In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (45 page)

The two women had barely begun to work together when they were featured on a San Francisco television program, for such was the media’s interest, in those days, in what feminists were doing. Marta and Marya were perfect in tandem. “Just fabulous,” Marya recalls. Marta, flamboyant and charismatic, spoke of the macho resistance to dealing with battery in the Latino community. Marya, calm on the outside but inwardly quaking, offered a few select details from her childhood to make the point that battery was a form of male violence that cut across class lines. After the TV program their phones started ringing off the hook, and Marya sat down and wrote some grant proposals. In short order, La Casa de las Madres acquired a decrepit four-story Victorian house on a dead-end street in the Duboce Triangle, which the women furnished with twenty-five beds. Later the shelter moved into a vacated convent. As one of the first shelters in the nation, La Casa became the model for ten spin-offs in the Bay Area alone.

“People flocked to us to learn how to do it,” Marya Grambs reminisces, “and we were so naive about everything. I mean, we were just going out of our hearts. I thought I’d spend my time doing counseling—that’s what I’d been trained for—but instead I did administrative work and raised money. As a collective, we needed to make so many policy decisions. We decided not to take substance-abusing women, or women who were not honorable and honest. I think we debated and decided not to take in the sons of battered women if they were over sixteen. Whether or not to make the address of the shelter public was always an issue. A lot of our white women had been beaten in interracial relationships, but we decided not to make that public because it was too incendiary. And we always denied that there was a greater incidence of battery among low-income families, although the studies today show that it’s true. There was always too much political correctness in the battered women’s movement.”

The battered women’s movement dearly wished to be a model of harmony that cut across the divides of race, class, and culture, but negotiating the shoals of political correctness proved particularly sticky in one regard at La Casa. In her enthusiasm, Marya Grambs had involved many of her white, middle-class, college-educated lesbian friends in the shelter. Their lifestyles were at a great remove from the battered women of color on the La Casa staff, who were mainly heterosexual and working class, and had not had the benefits of a college education. It cut no ice with the battered women of color when the white lesbians maintained that they too were oppressed, marginalized pariahs in the outside world. Two and a half years after La Casa’s inception, Marta Segovia Ashley and the battered women of color routed the middle-class white lesbians from their posts. “After an unsuccessful attempt at mediation, we capitulated,” Grambs says. She departed for another shelter in Contra Costa. Ironically, Marta Segovia Ashley also departed La Casa soon after her victory, to pursue her interest in filmmaking. “La Casa was a mess for a long time,” Grambs sighs.

Yolanda Bako, a founder of
Women’s Survival Space in Brooklyn, calls her years as a battered women’s organizer “the best time in my life until I got demoralized and burnt out.” The Bronx-born daughter of Hungarian immigrants had grown up in an abusive family. After high school she earned her living as a secretary and joined New York NOW, where she was soon heading a rape prevention project. ERA lobbying, NOW’s priority that season, was too namby-pamby for her, but battered women’s organizing was just beginning to take off. When some state funding finally came through, Bako and Jan Peterson set up their shelter in an obsolete maternity hospital in Brooklyn that was offered to them by the city. Barbara Omolade, an African nationalist and community organizer, was one of their first hires.

At Women’s Survival Space, Bako mediated disputes between smokers and nonsmokers, women who cooked pork and those to whom it was an abomination, women who kept their quarters clean and women who didn’t, and she worked double shifts when no one came to relieve her. She tried to be understanding when her purse got stolen, and tried to be equally accommodating to the funding organizations on whom
they were dependent. I “bent myself into a pretzel,” she sighs, “to fit the terms of the grants,” traveling alone to San Juan one year to jump-start a battered women’s project when she did not speak any Spanish. All these things were bearable, and often exciting.

July 20, 1977, ranked as one of the high points. Bako and a score of her counterparts from shelters around the country assembled in the Roosevelt Room of the White House with government staffers to discuss family violence and to offer their input on national legislation. The meeting, which had been Jan Peterson’s idea, was arranged by Midge Costanza during her brief, lively tenure as President Carter’s liaison to grassroots organizations and “special interest groups” such as theirs. Bako carefully preserved the paper napkin with the gold seal of the United States that came with her cup of coffee.

But other aspects of Bako’s work were not bearable. She reflects, “At the Brooklyn shelter we saw stuff way above our abilities to handle. We took in substance-abusing battered women, schizophrenic battered women, battered women who were working as prostitutes, battered women who were hitting their kids. If you’d ask them about
that
, they’d say, ‘How do you expect me to get my kids to behave?’ At the shelter I had women with lifetime careers of being abused by many people and who were also abusing their own children. I remember one woman who had five children, each one with a different abusive spouse, and she was pregnant with her sixth. I had to strangle myself not to say anything negative. The way you get funding and church donations is to talk about pure victims. If you talk about the impurity of the victim, the sympathy vanishes. At this time I was still thinking I could change the world, but the truth is the shelter was not this collective sisterhood that we had hoped.”

Betsy Warrior’s hopes for collective sisterhood had been rudely shaken years earlier by the quarrels and dissolution of Boston’s Cell 16, but the self-educated working-class theoretician persevered once again in the new movement for battered women. Betsy, who had not finished high school, was quick to say that she knew about battery firsthand from her seven-year marriage. She helped out at Transition House, a shelter in Cambridge founded by Chris Mendez and Cheri Jimenez, two women on welfare who had left their abusive husbands but kept
their names—although Chris Mendez altered hers to Womendez, as a feminist statement.

Betsy’s go-to-meeting days were behind her. She viewed the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the strategizing and networking effort that had drawn in Yolando Bako of Brooklyn and Sharon Vaughan of St. Paul, with the weariness of a battle-scarred veteran. The National Coalition people were sincere, she felt, but too many of them “wanted to meet, meet, meet all the time,” and she was beyond that. Plus, she could see the handwriting on the wall. Careerists, social workers, professionals of all stripes were jumping onto the battery bandwagon, and she had never gotten on with those types. In all her years as a radical activist she hadn’t earned a penny from the movement, and that wasn’t about to change. So she never went to the conferences, the steering committees, the regional sessions. Instead she turned her apartment into an international clearinghouse for shelter information. Using index cards and an IBM Selectric, she compiled a Battered Women’s Directory of shelters, hot lines, and legal services in all fifty states. When the information on shelters started flooding in from abroad, she added those listings, too. “I was not a good typist,” she sighs, “but I got volunteers to help me.”

The Directory was not just a directory. Betsy included news clips and articles that interested her, and printed some of her own essays, too. She did the layout herself and put in pictures that she and Cheri Jimenez drew to break up the columns of type. Betsy Warrior’s directory was an invaluable service at a time when shelters were popping up nationwide and people were eager to make connections. The work wasn’t easy. Shelter addresses changed constantly, and there were always new listings to be added. Getting out each new, revised edition and scrounging up the money to pay the printer was a full-time job, but Betsy somehow managed it while working part-time as a janitor, a library clerk, a gas station attendant, even going on welfare when she had to.

When technology changed, Betsy acquired a computer and taught herself WordStar. That speeded up the process. And then one day she received a call from someone in Washington who said that her group
had gotten a grant to produce a directory of services for battered women, and could Betsy please send along her lists to help them compile theirs? “I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “I’d been
doing
the work for years while
they’d
been out looking for
grants.
” The ninth and final edition of Betsy Warrior’s self-published Battered Women’s Directory, 283 pages, appeared in 1985.

I watched the battered women’s movement from a sisterly distance, and was deeply impressed even as I developed philosophic differences with some of its tenets. The larger women’s movement had begun to lump rape and battery together under the general rubric of “violence against women,” and I thought that was sloppy thinking. Rape was a one-time event, whether it happened in the context of a date or was committed by a stranger, or strangers, unknown to the victim. Battery was systemic violence within an intimate, ongoing, emotionally complex relationship. Any woman could become a victim of rape, but a pattern of physical abuse in a long-standing relationship begged for further interpretation.

The battered women’s movement seemed off to a good start in its early years. Lenore Walker’s first book offered interesting observations about the pervasive sense of guilt and the low self-worth of the battered women she studied, their denials, manipulations, chronic depressions, and uncanny ability to withstand enormous amounts of pain during a violent episode, their secret fears of not being conventionally feminine, their agonizing dread of failing at the supreme test of keeping a man. I hoped that Walker and other theorists would pursue these important lines of inquiry. Instead, movement theory went into stasis, to avoid the trap of “blaming the victim.”

It seemed to me that many of the battered women’s advocates developed a bunker mentality marked by rigid and fixed positions partly because of the enormity of the violence they were confronting, immersed as they were in what amounted to a war zone. Shelter volunteers and staff workers heard war stories every day; they saw the bruises, the black eyes, the effects of the broken ribs. Identifying with the guarded, fearful personalities of the women they were championing, they oversimplified the complexities of male-female relations and publicly characterized batterers as all-powerful brutes, and the
women in their sway as pure victims, even when they had reason to know better.

The battered women’s movement developed a serious blind spot in its refusal to take a hard look at the women who stayed in battering relationships or who returned to their deadly batterers again and again. “Fear,” “economic dependence,” and “society’s lack of options” became the only permissible answers to the nagging question “Why doesn’t she leave?” The question became the movement’s bugaboo, and still is today.

In England, Erin
Pizzey tackled the question head-on in her 1982 book,
Prone to Violence
. Pizzey’s refuges were famous for taking the most difficult cases; in ten years of work she had seen too many of her women go back to their abusers, only to be killed at their hands. After one such tragedy, she invented a powerful new slogan: “No Man Is Worth Dying For.” Reluctantly but inexorably, Pizzey arrived at the conclusion that some women sought out abusive relationships, at least subconsciously. For years she hesitated to discuss her findings, afraid the vast majority of nonrepeaters would be lumped with the violence-prone in the public’s mind, but the time had become ripe, she felt, for a more sophisticated analysis of the hard-core cases. In her analysis, some women, subjected to violent abuse since childhood, had become “cross-wired” for pleasure and pain. Others, she theorized, were addicted to the rush of adrenaline that accompanied the drama of a big battle. Pizzey’s findings were anecdotal and speculative, but, never one to shrink from controversy, she did not mince her words.

Neither did her infuriated opponents in Women’s Aid Federation, the wing of the British battered women’s movement that had long wished she’d disappear. “
I was picketed at a lovely luncheon at the Savoy,” she laughs bitterly. “The banners read
ALL MEN ARE RAPISTS/ALL MEN ARE BATTERERS/ERIN PIZZEY IS THE ENEMY!
It happened again when I spoke at St. Andrews University in Scotland. Scottish Women’s Aid handed out leaflets with the charming words ‘Erin Pizzey says women like to be beaten!’ ”

Pizzey became a prophet without honor in her home country and in the United States. Scorned by the movement she founded, she turned to writing novels, lush historical romances, to keep body and soul together.
When I interviewed her for this book, she was living in Tuscany, divorced from her second husband, tending to her dogs, cats, and manuscripts, and waiting tables at a cafe while organizing a women’s group in town. She has since returned to England, where she continues to write and publish.

After nearly a decade of feminist agitation in concert with legislative initiatives pioneered by Representative Lindy Boggs and Senator Barbara Mikulski, Congress passed the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act in 1984. Today,
approximately eighteen hundred battered women’s shelters, hot lines, and advocacy programs around the country are funded by the federal program.

My public quarrel with the battered women’s movement did not take place until 1989 during one of the most avidly watched trials of the decade. I wish I had known then of Pizzey’s
Prone to Violence
. I would have felt less alone.

I was watching the local TV news on the night in November 1987 when the Steinberg-Nussbaum case broke. Three days later I opened a new file in my computer and wrote the first page of
a novel. Usually I tamped down my intermittent impulses to write fiction, but I was driven to imagine my way inside the world of my Greenwich Village neighbors Joel Steinberg, a lawyer, and his battered common-law wife Hedda Nussbaum, a children’s book author and editor. I needed to understand the
folie à deux
that led to the death by Joel’s hands of the six-year-old, Lisa, they called their adopted daughter. Crack cocaine played a crucial role in my novel, as I learned it had in the true story. I believed the delusions induced by freebasing, as much as Joel’s disfiguring beatings, lay behind Hedda’s profound disintegration and her failure to summon medical help for fourteen hours while Lisa lay dying.