Why is the social group that society most often looks to for warmth, intimacy, and love also characterized by cruelty and violence? This book attempts to answer that seemingly ironic question. The authors examine aspects of family stress from both social and cultural viewpoints and conclude that violence grows out of the nature of social arrangements and cannot be explained in terms of the personalities of husbands and wives. They emphasize the fundamental contradictions built into family life as it is now constituted, and point out that counseling and family therapy alone will not decrease the level of violence in family settings. Real change will come about only with a restructuring of the relations between women and men, and that in turn is dependent upon a fundamental reallocation of power and status in society at large. In their examination of the apparently irrational or bizarre aspects of family life, the authors of this book move beyond the problem of physical violence to an understanding of the nature of the family itself.