Bad, mad or both: A legal history of battered woman syndrome

Abstract

The legal struggle for women's right to self-defence since the feminist mobilisation against violence in the 1970s reveals the startling history of the briefly expanded, and swiftly foreclosed, strategies for battered women's freedom in the late twentieth century. Voluminous legal scholarship focuses on the uses, promises and shortcomings of battered woman syndrome in the courts. But a historical accounting of the development and legal career of battered woman syndrome is essential to contextualising why this defence strategy took such tenacious root in the courtroom after the feminist self-defence cases of the 1970s and what was lost in the lurch toward a psychological theory of women's protective violence.