Quality book review of Elaine Weiss book, Surviving domestic violence: Voices of women who broke free - Term Paper Example

Download file to see previous pages This book by Elaine Weiss approaches the subject from the point of women who have experienced domestic violence and have managed to break free from it and rebuild their lives free from the influence of their abusive partner. It is at times a difficult book to read, but it offers genuine, realistic accounts from twelve survivors of domestic violence, each of them explaining in her own words what happened to her, and how she managed to escape.
The author has the advantage of being a highly qualified academic who can collect and synthesize information in a lucid and readable way. She is also herself a survivor of domestic violence, and this experience gives her the ability to understand and explain the emotional, rational and economic factors which influence a woman who undergoes this kind of harrowing experience. This dimension of personal experience gives the author a quiet authority. She is able to build trust with the reader very quickly, and persuades through her honesty and her straightforward, no-nonsense style of writing.
Chapter one begins with the author’s own story. The moving description of Elaine Weiss’s marriage and early career, marred by the violence of her ex-husband, exemplifies one of the main points of the book: domestic violence can happen to any woman, regardless of her social class, financial status, or educational background. As a successful, middle class career woman from a stable, and loving Jewish family background, Elaine Weiss was a confident and capable woman, but she was not immune to the harm that her partner brought into her life. Another point that this chapter emphasizes, is the extremely long spell of time that is usually required for a woman to summon up the strength to leave an abusive partner, settle into a new, independent life, and then overcome the after-effects of the violence that she has suffered. Elaine Weiss shows that there are no quick fixes to this social problem, but that with determination and ...Download file to see next pagesRead More