The following review appeared in the March 2015 issue of CHOICE:
52-3948
HQ1439
2014-11744 CIP
Sered, Susan Starr. Can't catch a break: gender, jail, drugs and the limits of personal responsibility, by Susan Starr Sered and Maureen Norton-Hawk. California, 2014. 216p bibl index afp ISBN 9780520282780, $65.00; ISBN 9780520282797 pbk, $29.95; ISBN 9780520958708 ebook, $29.95.
This is a moving ethnography about the struggles of 47 women who were forced into homelessness, unemployment, drug dependence, and frequent incarceration by the structural violence of poverty, racism, and gendered violence. Such women suffer physical and psychological illnesses caused by nightmarish abuses, but they continue to dream of living the middle-class lives they grew up aspiring to or even enjoyed in the past. Although the majority of the women in the study were white, the authors curiously suggest that the concept of "caste" is a more suitable description of the race-class-gender intersectionality of oppressions that combine to destroy the lives of impoverished women. Some privileged members of society avoid the needy under the assumption that poor people must have individually made bad decisions and should take individual responsibility to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The authors conclude by quoting Martin Luther King Jr. to suggest that the Violence against Women Act signed by President Bill Clinton has failed to adequately protect poor women from structural violence and that there is still a need for better legislation to "regulate the heartless" exploiters of abused women.
--B. Agozino, Virginia Tech Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries.
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