In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (44 page)

Vaughan flew to London to take a look at Chiswick Women’s Aid. (Too chaotic, she thought.) Upon her return, she assumed the directorship of Woman’s Advocates and then stubbornly turned it back into a collective. She stayed with it through all its Sturm und Drang until 1978, when she moved to the newly created Harriet Tubman Shelter across the river in Minneapolis. That year she helped write a comprehensive Domestic Abuse Act for Minnesota. “We had a legislator who would sponsor anything we wanted,” she recalls. She also helped found the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, an ambitious attempt by movement activists to develop a national network of shelters that shared their radical political values.

The first American book on domestic violence,
Battered Wives
by Del Martin, came out in 1976. Martin’s editor at Glide Publications, an offshoot of San Francisco’s progressive Glide Memorial Church, had suggested the project after encountering the British shelter movement and Pizzey’s book on a visit to London. Battery was a fresh field of inquiry for Martin, a pioneer in lesbian rights.

Martin had joined NOW in 1967 with Phyllis Lyon, her lifetime partner and cofounder of Daughters of Bilitis, the nation’s first lesbian organization. “
Gay men were just as sexist as heterosexual men,” she relates. “Phyllis and I knew that. We also knew that the feminists needed our input.” Hearing that NOW offered a reduced membership rate for couples, she and Phyllis applied together. “Ho, I think they dropped the couples membership plan after we sent in our application.” Martin and Lyon were received warmly by NOW’s San Francisco chapter, however, and in 1973 Martin was elected as the first open lesbian to NOW’s National Board. “And then I found three other lesbians,
but they were closeted,” she laughs. “They avoided me like the plague.”

Martin began her battery research by putting out the word to the feminist movement. “My editor and I knew,” she says, “that it was not just a British problem.” Betsy Warrior, one of the original Cell 16 theorists in Boston, had turned to battered women’s advocacy and was able to put her in touch with several shelters in the planning stages in Massachusetts. Sharon Vaughan used her quiet time on overnight duty at Woman’s Advocates in St. Paul to answer Martin’s inquiries in long, detailed letters. Martin learned about La Casa de las Madres, just getting started in San Francisco by Marta Segovia Ashley and Marya Grambs. She corresponded as well with Dorothy Jackson of Bradley/Angle House in Portland, named for two women who had died violently in that city.
Battered Wives
, highly regarded in the movement for its straightforward treatment of shelter organizing and funding, was updated and republished in 1981. By then several other books on the subject were on the shelves.

Lenore Walker, an empathic young psychologist on the faculty of Rutgers, had begun
to collect data on battered women in 1975, inspired by the report in
Ms
. on Pizzey’s shelter. In the throes of a divorce, she packed up her two kids and moved to Denver, taking an appointment at Colorado Women’s College to be near the man who eventually became her second husband. “I took my research with me,” she says. A field trip to Florida produced a set of interviews with elderly women, “and it was like wow, this thing doesn’t stop! At the time we still believed that criminally violent behavior decreases significantly after the age of forty.” The following year she visited Erin Pizzey’s shelters in England and observed the daily routines at a couple of safe houses run by Women’s Aid Federation, a rival feminist group that was deeply antagonistic to Pizzey’s anarchic, flamboyant style.

Walker also studied some intriguing animal behavior theories based on laboratory research. She began to see startling connections between the coping mechanisms of battered women and the behavior of caged dogs subjected to random and variable electric shocks. “Learned helplessness” became one of the linchpins of
The Battered Woman
, published
by Harper and Row in 1979. Coining the phrase “battered women’s syndrome,” Walker delineated a common cycle of violence: a honeymoon period followed by a buildup of tension, followed by an explosion and battery, followed by regrets and apologies, followed by another honeymoon period, etc. By featuring the stories of several professional women who had endured physical abuse in marriage, Walker put to rest the myth that battery was strictly a lower-class problem. Indeed, she showed that battery cut across all class lines without regard to income or professional status.

I heard Lenore Walker discuss her findings in May 1977, at a conference on violence at the University of Washington in Seattle. Women in the audience, evidently victims of battery, were nodding their heads and exchanging glances, as if to say
Yes, that’s how it was! She knows!
The electricity in the air reminded me of the early speak-outs on abortion and rape. Once again feminism was exposing hidden truths and offering fresh insights.

As it happened, the Seattle conference nudged the articulate psychologist in an unexpected direction. Pleading for a national campaign to change social attitudes, she declared, “We should have billboards across the country with John Wayne shaking his finger, saying,
YOU
’
RE A SISSY IF YOU BEAT YOUR WIFE
.”

“Women are being killed every day!” shouted a voice from the audience. “Can your words and theories help them?”

“Yes,” Walker replied, caught up in the fervor. “If they’re in danger of being killed and they fight back and kill the man, I’ll provide a defense for them!”

A wire service reporter quoted her stirring words, and a few days later she received a phone call from a lawyer in Billings, Montana, who was representing a battered woman who had killed her husband. He invited Walker to testify about battery cycles and learned helplessness for his jury. Nervously she agreed, and the trial ended in a not-guilty verdict by reason of self-defense. Walker got more requests to testify in court. She discovered that she never got rattled or lost her temper on the witness stand. Twelve years later, after appearing as an
expert witness in more than 150 murder trials across the United States, the personable psychologist with a clear, forthright manner calculated that 25
percent of the women she’d testified for had been fully acquitted, and two-thirds had not served any jail time.

The legal evolution of the “battered women’s defense,” as it came to be known, was built on the “rape defense” successfully argued by lawyer Susan Jordan in the second trial of Inez Garcia, and the successful appeal filed by Jordan, Nancy Stearns, and Liz Schneider for Yvonne Wanrow, the Spokane woman hobbling on crutches who killed a man for molesting her son. In 1977 the Washington State supreme court held in
Wanrow
that not only does the size and strength differential between men and women need to be considered, but also “women suffer from a conspicuous lack of access to training in and the means of developing those skills necessary to effectively repel a male assailant without resorting to the use of deadly weapons.”

I had used similar arguments in
Against Our Will
to explain the nature of rape, but I had not anticipated that they would become an aid to defense lawyers representing desperate, half-crazed battered women who had seen no way out other than to kill their tormentors. Lawyers do what they must to win acquittals. Armed with the new, and newsworthy, feminist concepts—“battered women’s syndrome,” “unequal combat,” and “imminent danger,” their defense strategies helped focus a spotlight on domestic violence. One such case, the horrendous story of Francine Hughes, a battered woman who set fire to her husband’s bed as he lay in a stupor, ended in acquittal on temporary insanity. Hughes had managed to save herself and her children before her house went up in flames. Her story became
The Burning Bed
, a book by Faith McNulty that was made into a prime-time television drama, starring Farrah Fawcett, in 1984.

Battered women who killed their tormentors were a very small part of the national picture, but every case that was publicized made the point that batterers needed to be stopped in their tracks by a responsive criminal justice system, beginning at the local precinct level, where too often a woman’s calls for help went unheeded.

Every aspect of the battered women’s movement—the shelters with their paid and unpaid staffs, the defense committees and legal strategies for women who killed their tormentors, the legislative initiatives on local, state, and federal levels, the advocates who helped their unfortunate
clients thread their way through a confusing maze of social services, the writers who produced a steady stream of books and articles—played a role in uncovering the heretofore hidden phenomenon of domestic violence. As in all the causes unearthed and promoted by feminist activists and theoreticians, the earliest pioneers were dedicated utopians on a mission, but this time, with this issue, they really had a tiger by the tail. By tackling spouse abuse, they were challenging male supremacy and patriarchal rule inside the family, where for centuries, aided by tradition and papered over by the conservative tenets of religion and an indifferent criminal justice system, any outside interference had been kept at bay. Once the battered women’s movement made its voice heard, a man’s home was no longer his castle.

Replicating the experience of the stop-rape movement, the battered women’s movement sought out and received government funds. The LEAA (Law Enforcement Assistance Administration) and the NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health), had allocated grants to antirape projects two years after the first rape crisis center was founded. Once again responding to a feminist initiative, the agencies began earmarking a portion of their budgets for the new campaign against domestic violence. After VISTA, a Nixon administration program, was phased out, CETA (the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act), a Carter administration program, took up the slack. Coveted CETA contracts enabled shelters to pay minimal salaries to a small number of staff workers.

The fierce scramble for government funds among competing groups exacerbated the
differences in philosophy that inevitably arose among shelter programs. Some points of contention: how overtly feminist (or anticapitalist, or antihierarchical) should a shelter be? should advocates cooperate with the legal prosecution of a batterer when the victim doesn’t want to see her husband jailed? how closely should the shelter movement work with child abuse interventions? how useful are group therapy programs for batterers, or for batterers and spouses? Many of the original shelter workers reacted with dismay when professional psychologists and social workers converged on the field in which they’d done the crucial spadework. Fearing that their movement’s mainstream acceptance signaled that it was being taken away
from them—a common fate for radical activists who launch new issues—some intense ideologues seized on the imagined perfidy of others, bruiting about charges of racism, homophobia, class privilege. One issue proved too close to home to be addressed at all at this time: physical violence and partner abuse in the lesbian community did not emerge as a movement issue until the mid-1980s.

After the first, intense flush of excitement, the battered women’s movement was a tough venue to work in, perhaps the most difficult of all the feminist causes. It suffered from burnout and divisive internal struggles stemming from the usual problems endemic to all movements for social change—theoretical disputes, personality differences, ego trips, and power plays. Additionally, the women’s proximity to irrational violence, and to great fear and suffering, heightened their tensions. Shelter founders who started off as sisterly comrades and fast friends were often at each other’s throat a few years down the line.

In San Francisco, Marya Grambs and Marta Segovia Ashley of
La Casa de las Madres had been a great team at the beginning, partly because they were such an unlikely combination. Marta was a Chicana from a poor, working-class family who was drawn to social activism and who also wanted to make films. Marya was a recently divorced young mother seeking to put her master’s degree in clinical psychology to good use. Her mother taught at a university and wrote sociology textbooks, and her father worked in the federal government. But beneath their class differences, the two young women shared a bond of terrible family violence. Marta’s stepfather had murdered her mother. Marya’s childhood home in a Washington suburb had been haunted by the sounds of her unstable, alcoholic father beating her mother, who never gathered the courage to leave him.

The founding of La Casa was a wonderful movement story. Marta Segovia Ashley was housing battered women in sleeping bags in her house when Marya Grambs, a volunteer at A Woman’s Place bookstore, heard of her work and sought her out. Grambs had the skills that Ashley needed to turn her dream of a full-service shelter into a reality.

“Joining up with Marta was my epiphany,” Marya Grambs relates. “The violence in my childhood had derailed me for years. I’d had a breakdown at college, and it had taken me nine years to get my degree. Okay, it was too late for my mother, too late for me and my brother and sister and my father, but here was a chance to do something for others, a powerful, extraordinary, meaningful opportunity.”