In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (43 page)

The term “feminist author” largely replaced the odious “woman writer,” or worse, “lady writer.” Lumped together as a group, the novelists and nonfiction authors mining the new feminist themes, or benefiting from the sudden interest in all things female, were not a cohesive entity in any sense, but the New York writers bumped into one another regularly at publication parties. Two or three wine-and-cheese receptions a week were not unusual in those years. It was remarkable how few male authors, if any, showed up for the festivities. A sprinkling of proud husbands and tweedy, pipe-smoking editors was about the extent of male representation. The novelists in our midst felt the snubs from their male peers most keenly. Whatever entry into the literary world meant to them, their dreams of “arriving” did not anticipate ghettoization.

Those of us whose writing careers were enlarged or made possible by feminism occupied a special niche inside the movement. Our appearance between hard covers elevated us to the status of Famous Feminists—“FFs” in movement shorthand—a little aristocracy imbued with the self-congratulatory importance that afflicts all little aristocracies that emerge from within outsider societies.

Ever the realist, I tried to retain some perspective on my changed fortune.

“NO MAN IS WORTH DYING FOR”

Most of the great feminist issues of the 1970s were Made in America exports, but the campaign against domestic violence began in England, when Erin Pizzey founded the first shelter for battered women in the London suburb of Chiswick.
Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear
, Pizzey’s
pioneering book on battery and the shelter concept, was never published in the United States, but many of us managed to acquire copies at feminist bookstores or conferences.

Capacious in size, by turns generous and truculent in nature, Erin Pizzey was an opinionated
housewife with a BBC reporter husband, two small children, and a dream of becoming a writer when she volunteered to do office work for the Women’s Liberation Workshop in London. Fairly quickly she ran afoul of the group’s radical-left orientation. In fact, Pizzey won the distinction of being the first and only woman
officially thrown out of the London movement, by formal letter, after she called the cops on The Angry Brigade, a violent faction. That was Erin; she was always battling some force or other.
Born in China on the eve of World War II, the daughter of an Irish career officer in the British foreign service, she had experienced a peripatetic childhood that had been emotionally deprived and fitfully violent.

After her banishment from the London group, Pizzey and a handful of her supporters persuaded the borough of Hounslow to give them a dilapidated, condemned house in Chiswick to use as a daytime
women’s center. Fixed up by volunteer labor, No. 2, Belmont Terrace opened in November 1971. It consisted of “two rooms up, two rooms down, with the lavatory outside,” in Pizzey’s words, and its interior was painted bright orange. It had a children’s playroom, the first priority in the rehab process. After much discussion, a sign bearing the rather old-fashioned name “Chiswick Women’s Aid” was tacked on the front door. The friendly gathering place where neighborhood mothers were encouraged to bring their kids would prove to be only the beginning of a much larger, astonishingly inventive project.

“A year later there were thirty-four women and children living in the community,” Pizzey relates in
Scream Quietly
. “If we’d known what was to happen I wonder whether we might not have put down our paint brushes and run.”

The first battered woman to seek shelter at Chiswick Women’s Aid is called Jenny in
Scream Quietly
. Her real name was Kathy. “
Kathy didn’t say anything when she walked in,” Pizzey remembers. “She just took off her wool jersey and she was covered with these liver-blue bruises. I snapped. I mean, I suddenly regressed into my own past, when I’d looked like that as a child. Kathy was our first overnight guest. Naturally I couldn’t leave her alone in Belmont Terrace, so I took her home with me. When my husband came in, I said ‘Jack, be quiet, there is a very badly beaten woman upstairs and she’s sleeping.’ He asked, ‘Has her husband come around?’ ‘Of course not,’ I replied. “He doesn’t know where she is.’ With that, there was a
bang, bang, bang
on the door and there was Wally, her husband, and he’s bellowing
‘I am a very violent man.’
You should have seen Jack run! So I held Wally back and said ‘No, Wally, you can’t come in, this is my private house. I’ll come round and see you tomorrow.’ Well, after that it was like a flood.”

Within a year Pizzey was being excoriated from the local pulpits as a home wrecker and marriage breaker. On the brighter side, No. 2, Belmont Terrace had been joined by No. 369, Chiswick High Road, a substantial old house with three indoor toilets and a large rear garden. Pizzey had found a benefactor in one of the British Astors, who contributed sixty thousand pounds toward the new shelter’s rehabilitation and upkeep. Another prominent backer walked in one day, plunked
himself down on a mattress, and asked, “What do you need?” He turned out to be the managing director of Bovis, the huge construction firm. “I was very good at hustling money,” she reminisces. “Of course we had our jumble sales as well.”

Pizzey ran her battered women’s shelter on a principle she called “therapeutic chaos,” a style that was enjoying a vogue at that time through the work of R.D. Laing and others. “Oh, I loved Laing,” she says. “We were happening at the same time. But I was influenced by the therapeutic community ideas of Maxwell Jones, who wrote fascinating papers on his social rehabilitation unit at a psychiatric hospital in Surrey.”

She provided a lively, crowded, and noisy environment for her emotionally strung-out charges. The television set blared, the air was thick with cigarette smoke, and the women, who came and went at will, danced, sang, chased about, and slept on mattresses arranged on the wood floor. Anne Ashby was her chief associate. A male helper, Mike Dunne, was hired to make the point to the women and kids that not all men were violent.

“Most of these mothers had never played when they were kids,” Pizzey explains. “They were sitting on their rage. We would take up their energy level with our energy level. I had enormous energy levels—I’d exhaust everybody. Some of the women were half my age and I’d still be dancing around while they were crawling off to bed. One woman was so angry yet so totally passive that I knew she was using every ounce of her energy to hold herself in. I told her, ‘It’s okay to explode.’ So she got drunk, exploded, and attacked me. I weighed 250 pounds then, so I just very gently put her on the floor and held her in my arms and sang ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’ to her until she got calm. A lot of Chiswick was about letting people cry, especially the young, violent boys, because they didn’t know how.”

Empowerment was another of Erin’s principles. House meetings were held every morning—attendance was optional but everyone came—and the residents voted on their own rules. Women seeking refuge could come, go, or stay at the shelter for as long as they wished. (For some women, Pizzey discovered, the shelter would always be a revolving door.) When a filmmaker arrived to do a documentary, Pizzey
stayed in the back room and let the residents run the show. When the borough of Hounslow tried to close down No. 2, Belmont Terrace as a health hazard because of overcrowding, the residents led marches on the council.

Pizzey’s shelter concept spread rapidly to Leeds, Liverpool, Acton. A wife-and-husband team, Rebecca and Russell Dobash, pioneered the refuge idea in Scotland and began to write extensively about domestic violence.
Time
’s London bureau did a story on Chiswick, but the piece ran only in the international edition. The magazine’s New York editors had pigeonholed battery as a British problem, just as a London newspaper was to pigeonhole rape as an American problem a few years later.

Scream Quietly
—its title came from one of Pizzey’s battered women—was published by British Penguin in 1974. By then, news of the shelter movement had filtered into the States. On a visit to London in 1973,
Karen Durbin reported on Chiswick for
The Village Voice
, but the
editors stalled for a year before running her story. “
The subject was strange and upsetting back then, shrouded in a dozen kinds of denial,” Durbin recalls.
Ms
. ran a short piece based on Durbin’s reporting, and the
Ladies’ Home Journal
printed her
anecdotal account of wife beating in America. Marjorie Fields, director of Legal Aid Service in Brooklyn, analyzed five hundred divorce cases and found that more than half of the female litigants had been physically assaulted by their husbands. The sociologists Richard Gelles, Murray Straus, and Susan Steinmetz undertook an epidemiological study, reporting that a physical assault occurred in 28 percent of all American households in a given year. In the meantime, rudimentary shelters were popping up in activists’ homes across the country.

Wiry, energetic
Sandy Ramos believes she started the first shelter in North America, almost by accident, in her purple-painted, three-bedroom house at 133 Cedar Avenue in Hackensack, New Jersey. A Jewish runaway from Brooklyn, Ramos had spent three years in an upstate New York reformatory before she married at eighteen. In 1970 she was pregnant with her third child, enthralled by the Black Panthers, and going through a divorce. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” she says, “but I knew I wanted to share my house with other single mothers. It
turned out that a lot of them had been battered. Helga, my first resident, came in the middle of the night with her three children and three cats.”

Seven years later Ramos had twenty-three people living with her. A church in Paterson was sending over meal cans. She named her refuge Save Our Sisters, made T-shirts with the slogan “Never Another Battered Woman,” and fought to start more shelters in New Jersey. “People would say, ‘We don’t want battered women in our neighborhood,’ and I’d say ‘You have them already, behind closed doors.’ I’m five feet four and I was fighting the whole establishment,” she exclaims. “In those days the courts didn’t even have restraining orders. When we heard that the Bergen County freeholders had allocated a million dollars for a dog shelter and nothing for battered women, we brought poodles to their next meeting. The press grabbed ahold of it. Confrontational politics worked.”

Like most of the early shelters,
Woman’s Advocates in St. Paul, Minnesota, evolved in an unpremeditated fashion. It grew out of the political work of a Twin Cities collective led by Sharon Rice Vaughan, a St. Paul native and activist in the Catholic left, and Susan Ryan, an idealistic VISTA volunteer from New York.

Divorced in 1970 and raising three small children, Sharon Vaughan was a mainstay of the Honeywell Project, dedicated to stopping the Minneapolis company from making the antipersonnel cluster bombs that were dropped on Vietnam. Her antiwar activism had led to an arrest in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, during the trial of the Berrigan brothers and Sister Elizabeth McAlister. “Oh, I was arrested several times,” she recounts. “That time I spent a week in jail.”

Ryan was five years younger than Vaughan and more inclined toward the counterculture. She, too, was active in the Honeywell Project, as well as in a consciousness-raising group that hoped to start a women’s center and food co-op. She recruited Vaughan for a new VISTA program, a phone service offering information on legal rights in separations and divorce. “The women called about everything,” Vaughan remembers. “We learned that you can’t isolate and fragment women’s issues. A lot of the women were battered, and trapped in their homes for lack of options. There were thirty-seven places in Minneapolis–St.
Paul for a man to stay, and one place for a woman—a welfare hotel.”

In 1972, Susan Ryan began sheltering women in her spartan one-bedroom apartment. When Ryan’s landlord started eviction proceedings, Sharon Vaughan moved the informal shelter to her home.

“I was living on child support and two hundred dollars a month from VISTA,” Vaughan relates, “but I filled the house for two years, especially in the summer, when my kids went away with their father. The women slept on the floor, next to the green plastic garbage bags that held their belongings.”

“We had volunteers answering the phone day and night,” Ryan adds. “Bernice Sisson would pick the women up in her car. We bought the food, and the women helped with the cooking. There was a sign-up sheet for chores. Some women got food stamps—it was easier in those days to qualify for food stamps.”

“My five-year-old came home from her private school one day and asked, ‘Mother, are we rich or are we poor?’ ” Vaughan remembers. Ultimately 118 women and kids passed through her doors. “A few of them robbed me,” she admits. “The Tiffany wedding silver went. They didn’t take the knives, for some reason. Then my jeans got stolen from the clothesline in the basement—that made me madder than anything.”

“Sharon’s house started to be overcrowded,” Ryan continues, “so we stepped up our plans to buy a real shelter. On behalf of Woman’s Advocates we sent a letter to five hundred people and got about six hundred dollars a month in pledges.” The two women found a ramshackle six-bedroom frame house with two fireplaces and a huge attic on Grand Avenue, ten minutes by bus from downtown St. Paul.

“We thought we could start this house without going for what we were then calling ‘dirty money,’ ” Vaughan says, “but we couldn’t.” Woman’s Advocates applied for and received grants from two private foundations and the Ramsey County mental health division. The financial aid came with procedural stipulations, review policies, plans for a second facility, and the requirement that the women’s nonhierarchical collective be replaced by an overseeing board and a staff director.

Susan Ryan walked out in the middle of a foundation meeting. “I hated the professionalization of our shelter,” she says. “My vision was a small place the women would run themselves. Who were these people to tell us to put our energy into writing proposals? We’d been doing the job for two years! My leaving hurt Sharon very badly, but it was a two-way thing. We put our lives on the back burner to create that shelter. I sacrificed my marriage to that shelter, I had a traumatic childbirth, an emergency cesarean on my lunch hour, because of that shelter.”