This book springs from a lifelong endeavor to understand the violence that marked my own childhood. It is the product of years of interviews and conversations with women who have been battered and with others who work on their behalf. The names of those to whom I owe thanks would fill many pages, so I can acknowledge here only some special debts. I’m grateful to the Millay Colony for the Arts for once again providing precious workspace and peace, and to Mount Holyoke College for a travel grant that enabled me to conduct several interviews. Many students at Mount Holyoke College—young women who represent the future—helped me out in one way or another as I wrote this book: Giulietta Swenson, Jennifer Rodrigue, Susan Gehrke, Kristin Meausky, Kathleen Lyons, Iris Fischer, Margaret Rooks, and Jennifer Fisher. The librarians of Mount Holyoke College and Joan Grenier and Lily Sibley of the Odyssey Bookshop found everything I asked for. Mary Haviland assisted me with legal research. Anne Ganley, Erika Munk, Laurie Woods, and Elizabeth Schneider read one or another chapter of this book with critical eyes. And Susan Schechter, with whom I collaborated on a previous book, proved once again a wise and thoughtful colleague; she read the whole manuscript more than once and encouraged me beyond measure.
I cannot adequately thank my many other friends and colleagues in the battered women’s movement for debts incurred over the years, but I would like to acknowledge particularly the work and help of Ellen Pence, Holly Maguigan, Jean Grossholtz, Angela Browne, David Adams, Marie Fortune, Beth Richie, Valli Kanuha, Suzanne Pharr, Sara Buel, Sue Osthoff, Donna Ferrato, Anne Menard, Esta Soler, Joan Zorza, Betty Levinson, Michael Paymar, Barbara Hart, and Evelina Giobbe. I want also to acknowledge my friends who, although they are not affiliated with the battered women’s movement, help me through countless acts of kindness to imagine a world without violence: Joan Silber, Patricia Lewis, Valerie Martin, Janie Geiser, Phyllis Grosskurth, Marilyn French, Lois Gould, Nell Schofield, Fran Moore, Dan Domench, and the late Liz Knights. I am grateful to Charlotte Sheedy and Octavia Wiseman for friendship as well as literary agency, to Lauren Bryant, Marya Van’t Hul, and Wendy Strothman at Beacon Press for their patience and expert guidance in preparing the first edition of this book, and to Amy Caldwell and David Coen for guiding the revised edition. Thanks too to Cathy Nardo of the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence and all the activists in the field who helped this revised edition catch up with their great work.
My greatest debt, of course, is to all the survivors of assault and battery who told me their stories over the years in hopes that my retelling might help other women to escape or to change the conditions of our lives. This book is for them.