Runaway Wives

In the supposedly enlightened ’60s and ’70s, violence against women was widespread. It wasn’t talked about, and women had few, if any, options to escape their abusers. Yet in 1973 — with no statistics, no money and little public support — five disparate groups of Canadian women quietly opened Canada’s first battered women’s shelters. Today, there are well over 600. In Runaway Wives and Rogue Feminists, journalist Margo Goodhand tracks down the “rogue feminists” whose work forged an underground railway for women and children, weaving their stories into an unforgettable — and until now untold — history. As they lobbied for funding, scrounged for furniture and fended off outraged husbands, these women marked a defining moment in Canadian history, triggering monumental changes in government, schools, courts and law enforcement. But was it enough to stop the cycle of violence? Forty years later, these pioneers describe how and why Canada has lost its ground in the battle for women’s rights.

Based on a study of over 400 women worldwide, Runaway Husbands: The Abandoned Wife's Guide to Recovery and Renewal, is the first book to explore and offer healing strategies to women whose lives have been turned upside down by Wife Abandonment Syndrome. This Revised and Updated edition expands on the groundbreaking first edition that led to the development of an amazing global community of women working together to recover from Wife Abandonment Syndrome - when a husband leaves out-of-the-blue from what his wife believed to be a happy, secure marriage. Following his sudden departure, he typically replaces the caring he'd previously shown her with blame and anger, leaving his bewildered wife totally devastated. The Revised and Updated edition includes new chapters that discuss the husband's possible Covert Narcissism, the effect of this kind of divorce on the father/adult child relationship and the challenges of co-parenting with an ex following abandonment. Written by family therapist Vikki Stark, MSW, who herself had a runaway husband, the book helps women understand in full what could motivate a loving husband to morph overnight into an uncaring stranger and provides them with the tools they need to move forward and rebuild their lives.

From 1937 to 1949, Beijing was in a state of crisis. The combined forces of Japanese occupation, civil war, runaway inflation, and reformist campaigns and revolutionary efforts wreaked havoc on the city’s economy, upset the political order, and threatened the social and moral fabric as well. Women, especially lower-class women living in Beijing’s tenement neighborhoods, were among those most affected by these upheavals. Delving into testimonies from criminal case files, Zhao Ma explores intimate accounts of lower-class women’s struggles with poverty, deprivation, and marital strife. By uncovering the set of everyday tactics that women devised and utilized in their personal efforts to cope with predatory policies and crushing poverty, this book reveals an urban underworld that was built on an informal economy and conducted primarily through neighborhood networks. Where necessary, women relied on customary practices, hierarchical patterns of household authority, illegitimate relationships, and criminal entrepreneurship to get by. Women’s survival tactics, embedded in and reproduced by their everyday experience, opened possibilities for them to modify the male-dominated city and, more importantly, allowed women to subtly deflect, subvert, and “escape without leaving” powerful forces such as the surveillance state, reformist discourse, and revolutionary politics during and beyond wartime Beijing.

"One evening in early August, while mashing the potatoes for dinner, Connie McColl decides she's had enough ... Connie is tired of solving one family crisis after another - usually involving her unruly grandchildren - while her husband Roger spends all day at his beloved golf course. Surely it must be time for her to shake off her apron and start living again? So Connie packs a bag, gets in her little green car and drives off ... As Connie journeys from England to Scotland on an unexpected adventure, she finally begins to rediscover herself. And she starts to wonder, will she ever be ready to return home? Or will this summer change her life forever?"--

A positive step-by-step programme for putting your life back together when your relationship ends.

For use in schools and libraries only. Three beautiful French sisters entrust an American hiker with the mission of rescuing their mother high in the Alps. But what if she doesn't want to be found? Recently fired from his high-power finance job and dumped by his fiancee, Jim Olsen has come to the Swiss Alps to clear his head. At the charming Cabane des Audannes, he meets Clio, Thalia and Helene Castellane, who are on a quest of their own: their mother, Calliope, has fled to these mountains to escape her philandering politician husband's most recent scandal. As snow threatens to descend upon the Alps, the women have come to bring their mother home. But the sisters are at the point of surrender; it is time for them to return to Paris. Buoyed by wine and inspired by their beauty, Jim impetuously volunteers to assume their search, but soon realizes that he is in over his head.The Alps are filled with beauty and danger, not the least of which is Calliope's desire to stay hidden.And all the while Jim finds himself haunted by the memory of her daughters and conflicted in his desire for them. The Runaway Wife is a story of adventure, survival, and romance-and of a man's discovery of a world outside his conventional life and a new vision of himself within it.

"A Runaway Wife is a novel, based on a true story, which relates the psychological and physical vulnerability of Saudi Arabian women. Fairooz, an oppressed member of a closed society, left her husband to pursue her dream; speaking out loud, demanding to salvage her lost entitled human rights. She conveys how Saudi society does not abide by God's laws, abusing her as a woman, forcing her to run away from her home.