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This article overviews the findings of a domestic violence and disability study undertaken in 2005. The study was sponsored by Middlesbrough Domestic Violence Forum and funded by the Neighbourhood Support Fund, Middlesbrough, as one way of taking forward their equal opportunities commitments to this group of women, in the wake of the domestic homicide of a local disabled woman. Although local, it is one of the very few recent UK studies to address this issue, so its findings have national significance.

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been compounded by the failure of courts to recognize that women are not solely dependents, but are also political actors in their own right. Crawley acknowledges that there has been some movement towards a recognition of certain groups of women as 'social groups' according to the 1951 Convention (for example the case of Shah Islam in Britain), but stresses the significance of the public/private divide for women seeking asylum in Western countries.All of the contributions to this volume problematize state and nation, though it is the latter that emerges from these contributions as the most damaging in terms of women's identity. The construction of the nation as a natural entity seems inevitably to depend for its continuance on women, but their function within this scheme is reproductive, both physically and in transmitting the values of the nation to new generations (Jacobson, Maitse, Mukta). While the nation seems to constitute an unequivocal danger to women, the state seems redeemable for some. Macaulay on Brazil and Howell on China chronicle the attempts of women to work through the state. In the first case, Macaulay discusses the attempts of women's NGOs to pressurise government at local and national level to respond to violence against women, resulting, for example, in the creation of women's police stations. Howell considers the work of the All-China Women's Federation, which represents women's issues. In each case, while progress has been achieved, the authors conclude that the constraints of operating within traditional state structures make such progress extremely slow.What emerges clearly from this collection of very different voices is the continuing need to embrace a radical agenda. Liza Schuster doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400093Saving Bernice: battered women, welfare and poverty Jody Raphael; Northeastern University Press, Boston, MA 2000, d14.50 pbk, ISBN 1-55553-438-4, d39.00 hbk, 184pp This book looks at the impact of domestic violence on mothers attending welfare to work programmes in the US. By focussing on the story of one African-American mother on welfare -Bernice, Jody Raphael sets out to challenge a number of received wisdoms about mothers living on welfare, domestic violence and poverty, and to cover a range of connected issues. She argues that many women in receipt of welfare payments who had previously been viewed as 'single' mothers do in fact have partners, and suggests that US survey evidence shows that between 20% and Book reviews feminist review 73 2003 177