It was pretty much my fault

Yes, Francine was finally right in that she admitted that it was her fault because she conceded that she showed extremely stupidity to have married such an abusive, wicked loser like Mickey when there were many other decent men out there that she could have chosen to marry. Just like how a bank robber had a choice before choosing to rob a bank, Francine had the choice to decline Mickey's marriage proposal and instead accept all her other suitors. Given the fact that she was fairly attractive when she was a young woman, I'm sure lots of men tried to pursue her in droves and she had a huge selection to choose from. She could have chosen wisely and married a nice, smart, decent man who a great future with a good education and career. But noooooo....she chose poorly and married a man without a bright education, career, and was an alcoholic. As a result, she got her deserts and comeuppance by choosing to marry lowlife loser in Mickey.

Francine blamed herself because battered women are told by their abusers so often that they're responsible for their own abuse -- they dress too sexily, they spend too much money, they're stupid, they can't cook, they can't keep house, they're lousy mothers -- that they come to believe it. You might as well ask why concentration-camp inmates don't rebel; the reason, of course, is that they're beaten down for so long that they become convinced that their oppressors are all-powerful and resistance is futile.

The commenters in this thread are looking at Francine's case through the filter of what we now know about domestic violence. Things were much different in the 1960s and 1970s when Francine and Mickey were married.

As a police officer testified during her trial, police didn't even arrest batterers unless they saw the attack. A repeat abuser like Mickey was too cunning to hit Francine in front of the cops. When she called the police, he'd simply sit down and wait for them. For any other crime, a badly beaten victim who said "He did it" would be probable cause for arrest, but not if the batterer and the victim were married to each other. Then domestic violence became a family matter, not a crime. Since they didn't arrest him, it wasn't unusual for Mickey to beat Francine again after the cops left.

Unlike many victims, Francine owned the house where she and her children lived. Her problem was that she HAD a place to go, but no one would help her force Mickey to move out. Most women who wanted to leave a batterer did NOT have a place to go, because domestic violence shelters didn't exist. Families wouldn't help, partly because like Francine's mother and mother-in-law, they lived in a milieu where domestic violence was normal, but also because relatives' homes were the first place where batterers looked for their victims. And if, like Francine, they dropped out of school to marry in their teens, they had no marketable skills and couldn't support a family.

It wasn't just female police officers who changed public opinion about domestic violence. It was also feminist scholars who pointed out that it's not a family problem, it's a societal problem.