Resistance to Prevention: Reconsidering Feminist Antiviolence Rhetoric

In this essay I examine some of the “classic” texts on violence against women. These texts, written between 1971 and 1985, were among the first in North America to examine the issues of violence against women, and to do so from an avowedly “feminist” standpoint. A decade later we are well placed to consider how violence against women came to be conceptualized by feminists such as Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin, Diana Russell, and Susan Griffin, and to understand how much of our thinking and our language was drawn from their work.