Fighting is common among contemporary Aboriginal women in Mangrove, Australia. Women fight with men and with other women—often with “the other woman.” Victoria Burbank’s depiction of these women offers a powerful new perspective that can be applied to domestic violence in Western settings.
Noting that Aboriginal women not only talk without shame about their angry emotions but also express them in acts of aggression and defense, Burbank emphasizes the positive social and cultural implications of women’s refusal to be victims. She explores questions of hierarchy and the expression of emotions, as well as women’s roles in domestic violence. Human aggression can be experienced and expressed in different ways, she says, and is not necessarily always “wrong.”
Fighting Women is relevant to discussions of aggression and gender relations in addition to debates on the victimization of women and children everywhere.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.
“The book contains a major statement on the comparative study of women—violence, aggression, and their psychosocial impact on women’s lives.”—Gilbert H. Herdt, University of Chicago
“Few gender stereotypes are more ubiquitous, even among feminists, than those portraying men as physically aggressive and women as their vulnerable victims. In this provocative, carefully researched exploration of women’s anger and aggression in an Aboriginal community in Australia, anthropologist Victoria Katherine Burbank exposes the cultural limits and implications of such views. Burbank found that in Mangrove the women fight nearly as much as the men, and there are no battered women. Her nuanced, measured approach to this explosive subject is the most intelligent, original, and salutary contribution to a cross-cultural understanding of women and aggression I have ever encountered. Scholars, educators, parents, policymakers, and women of all ages have much to learn from Fighting Women.”—Judith Stacey, author of Brave New Families
