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family violence and resistance to its social control. To protect the
structure of the family in a male-dominated society, argues Pleck,
those who resist the threat of social incursion appeal to the "Family
Ideal." The crucial elements of the Family Ideal are l)belief in
domestic privacy; 2)belief in conjugal and parental rights ; and
3)belief in the need to preserve the family.
The Family Ideal is an ever-present barrier to reform. Only
reformers paying tribute to it may successfully breach it . Histori–
cally, Pleck observes , this has meant that successful reformers reject–
ing the Ideal have had to
be
less than open . "Those who criticize it
most directly and vehemently were defeated .. .. The more suc–
cessful reformers have been politically cricumspect . . . and pre–
sented their remedies as a means of preserving the home ." By claim–
ing to
restore
the family, moderate nineteenth-century feminists were
able to get conservative support for legislation against child abuse or
wife-battering. According to Pleck, this kind of subterfuge is the
norm, although it takes different forms in different periods .
Avoiding direct confrontations with the issue of family tyranny
usually has meant presenting family violence as simple criminal
behavior. Thus the Puritans buried their laws against wife-beating
in their criminal code. Sometimes public policy against domestic
violence was supported by wealthy and politically well-connected
persons who were above the suspicion of attacking the status quo .
This happened when the founders of the SPCC reassured the public
that they still were in favor of "good wholesome flogging of children ."
But when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony directly
attacked the Family Ideal , they failed .
In recent years some successful reforms were initiated by focus–
ing on the battered-child syndrome, and they have been furthered
by radical feminism , which has, according to Pleck , "deepened
thinking about the nature of male-female relations, marriage and
the family." As we know , the new feminist insight affirms that the
personal also is political. This perspective informs Pleck's book: she
sees the family in political terms . (Unlike "violence," "tyranny" is a
political term .) Nevertheless, even with so much current awareness ,
Pleck observes, confrontational reform that attacks the family itself
cannot be successfully carried out. "No social movement survives the
process of community acceptance with all its radical ideals intact ."
Pleck argues that we urgently need to "legitimize and expand
alternatives to the nuclear family ." Unfortunately this suggestion ,
which comes at the very end, is not expanded upon in her book. So
