BOOK REVIEW

Not If I Can Help It, by Meg Groff

(Rivertowns Books, Irvington New York 283 pages with List of Advocacy Organizations and Source Notes)

$32.95 hardcover; $22.95 paperback at Doylestown Bookshop

(Doreen Stratton Photo)

Two weeks have passed since reading Not If I Can Help It by Bucks County resident Meg Groff, an attorney who writes this memoir from cases about her advocacy of protecting families and defending women victims of domestic violence. Reading these cases, I recalled when I realized the pain, anger, and the silence from this unspeakable horror before it was considered to be a crime.

It was 1962, I was 21, living in California with my first husband Joe, an Airman in the United States Air Force stationed at Travis Air Force Base. Our off-base housing in Vacaville, California consisted of multi-attached four-plex apartments, single level with either one-two-or three-bedrooms.

The walls of the units were so paper thin, I could hear the activity of the family of a Sergeant, his wife and two children. My ex worked the graveyard shift on the base which meant for five nights of every seven I was a solitary sleeper, a fresh bride newly relocated from Doylestown.

One night, I was suddenly startled awake when I heard a man’s voice, as each word muffled with an authority matched with a fist hitting flesh. She was weeping. Quietly. I pulled myself to a sitting position and stared at the wall, listening to a tragic melody from two voices, one struggling against pain, the other inflicting power. When the man was spent, only silence. I slept poorly afterwards, wondering if she was dead or alive, realizing this evil had never visited my family’s home. What do I do?

When I mentioned it to Joe, and wondered how I could reach out to this woman, he responded, “Stay out of it.” To this day that is often the attitude when domestic violence touches family or friends.

When Joe’s tour of Travis ended, his reassignment to Guam began a chain of life events which returned me to Doylestown in 1975.

I became an activist in the mid-eighties and that was when I met Meg Groff. By then she was a Family Lawyer with the Bucks County Legal Aid Society where she “. . . Battled for Justice for Victims of Domestic Violence and for the Poor.”

Before she embraced that battle, Meg Groff’s early adult years involved a journey of pauses and leaps, as she describes the “legendary Sixties,” an era when she and husband Jim lived off the grid. Groff eventually enrolled in college hoping for a career in psychology until late one night, a knock on her door revealed a “ . . . tear-stained woman, barefoot, dressed only in a nightgown, with disheveled locks of long, blond hair partly shrouding her pretty face.” Meg was staring into the eyes of a typical domestic violence victim which continues even now, everywhere, every place, all the time.

This incident she witnessed happened before there were shelters, police safety measures, court hearings before a judge, protection from abuse orders, family mediation, and incarceration for crimes of severe abuse or murder. A law degree was now in her sight.

Groff shares with us cases about some of the legal aid clients she represented from her years with that agency. She describes the struggles women experience from abusive or stalking partners, denial of their children’s custody or solutions to climb out of poverty. The list of Advocacy Organizations at the end of the book is a journey of how far protection for women and families has progressed 40 years ago when Meg Groff chose Justice.

(Doreen Stratton Photo)

In late 1980 I served on the Board of A Woman’s Place, a shelter Groff was instrumental in getting started. Finishing Groff’s book, I remember the words of Beth Taylor, Executive Director at that time: “I’ll be happy when the day comes and we don’t need a shelter to protect women and children.”