Commentary Looking Backward to Move Forward: Revisiting Some Past Feminist Contributions to the Study of Violence Against Women Walter S. DeKeseredy, PhD Abstract Although empirical, theoretical, and policy work on violence against women in adult intimate relationships has advanced significantly in the past 40 years, feminist scholars, practitioners, and activists in the field continue to face many challenges, especially those generated by a growing legion of people fundamentally opposed to gendered social scientific analyses. The main objective of this article is to suggest means of effectively dealing with attempts to marginalize feminist scholar- ship. The approaches suggested include revisiting some major contributions from the past, including using broad and gender-specific definitions, local community surveys, and multiple methods. Keywords: feminism, gender, violence against women Introduction R ecently, only a few fields have moved as far and swiftly as the violence against women movement. Advances in the social scientific study have been even faster paced than the vaunted leaps in some of the physical sci- ences. Less than 40 years ago, an exhaustive bibliography of North American sources on then what was referred to as wife abuse would fit on a single index card. More literature on forcible rape and incest existed, but it did not meet to- day’s high disciplinary standards, and is now mainly read for its historic value. Today, aside from thousands of journal articles and scholarly book chapters, as well as hundreds of books, so many selected bibliographies have been compiled that we are now ready for annotated bibliographies of biblio- graphies. Consider too that the field’s leading periodical, Violence Against Women: An International and Inter- disciplinary Journal, is published 14 times a year. This is an important statement on the amount of time, money, and effort devoted around the world to enhancing a feminist social scientific understanding of the myriad of ways in which women are harmed by violence in private places. On top of numerous people studying and writing about violence against women, we have witnessed some major social and cultural shifts that have contributed to more progressive attention devoted to this type of victimization, such as Congress passing and reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). Such legislation is clearly warranted given that at least 11% of women in marital/ cohabiting relationships are physically abused by a male partner on an annual basis and at least 25% of college women experience some variant of sexual assault while in school (DeKeseredy and Schwartz 2013). Standing back to view these extraordinary achievements, one can only be awed at the coalition of feminist scholars, activists, practitioners, and others who did so much in so little time. Yet, we are currently witnessing some major challenges to these accomplishments, especially from those who are fundamentally opposed to a rich gendered under- standing of one of the world’s most compelling social problems. It is beyond the scope of this commentary to summarize their criticisms of feminist inquiry. Rather, the main objective of this article is to suggest means of effec- tively responding to attempts to marginalize feminist scholarship. The approaches suggested here include re- visiting some major contributions from the past, including using broad and gender-specific definitions, local commu- nity surveys, and multiple methods. Naming the Problem Defining violence against women is a basic social sci- entific act, and how one defines this problem is one of the most important research decisions that a scholar will make. Women are the primary targets of violence in private places Department of Sociology and Anthropology, West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia. VIOLENCE AND GENDER Volume 3, Number 4, 2016 ª Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. DOI: 10.1089/vio.2016.0010 1