How feminists tried to destroy the family!
Erin
Pizzey, founder of the battered wives' refuge, on how militant
feminists - with the collusion of Labour's leading women - hijacked
her cause and used it to try to demonise all men. During 1970, I was
a young housewife with a husband, two children, two dogs and a cat.
We lived in Hammersmith, West London, and I didn't see much of my
husband because he worked for TV's Nationwide. I was lonely and
isolated, and longed for something other than the usual cooking,
cleaning and housework to enter my life.
By the early
Seventies, a new movement for women - demanding equality and rights
- began to make headlines in the daily newspapers. Among the jargon,
I read the words "solidarity" and "support". I passionately believed
that women would no longer find themselves isolated from each other,
and in the future could unite to change our society for the better.
Within a few days I had the address of a local group in
Chiswick, and I was on my way to join the Women's Liberation
Movement. I was asked to pay £3 and ten shillings as a joining fee,
told to call other women "sisters" and that our meetings were to be
called "collectives".
My fascination with this new movement
lasted only a few months. At the huge "collectives", I heard shrill
women preaching hatred of the family. They said the family was not a
safe place for women and children. I was horrified at their
virulence and violent tendencies. I stood on the same platforms
trying to reason with the leading lights of this new organisation.
I ended up being thrown out by the movement. My crime was to
warn some of the women working in the Women's Liberation Movement
office off Shaftesbury Avenue that if it persisted in cooperating
with a plan to bomb Biba, a fashionable clothes shop in Kensington,
I would call the police.
Biba was bombed because the women's
movement thought it was a capitalist enterprise devoted to
sexualising women's bodies.
I decided that I was wasting my
time trying to influence what, to my mind, was a Marxist/ feminist
movement touting for money from gullible women like myself.
By that time, I'd met a small group of women in my area who agreed
with me. We persuaded Hounslow council to give us a tiny house in
Belmont Terrace in Chiswick. We had two rooms upstairs, two rooms
downstairs, a kitchen and an outside lavatory. We installed a
telephone and typewriter, and we were in business.
Every day
after dropping my children at school, I went to our little house,
which we called the Women's Aid. Soon women from all over Chiswick
were coming to ask for help. At last we had somewhere women could
meet each other and bring their children. My long, lonely days were
over.
But then something happened that made me understand
that our role was going to be more than just a forum where women
could exchange ideas. One day, a lady came in to see us. She took
off her jersey, and we saw that she was bruised and swollen across
her breasts and back. Her husband had taken a chair leg to her. She
looked at me and said: "No one will help me."
For a moment I
was somersaulted back in time. I was six years old, standing in
front of a teacher at school. My legs were striped and bleeding from
a whipping I had received from an ironing cord. "My mother did this
to me last night," I said. "No wonder," replied the teacher.
"'You're a dreadful child."
No one would help me then and
nobody would ever imagine that my beautiful, rich mother - who was
married to a diplomat - could be a violent abuser.
Until that
moment 35 years later, I had buried my past and assumed that because
we had social workers, probation officers, doctors, hospitals and
solicitors, victims of violence had enough help.
I quickly
discovered, as battered women with their children poured into the
house, that whatever was going on behind other people's front doors
was seen as nobody else's business.
If someone was beaten up
on the street, it was a criminal offence; the same beating behind a
closed door was called "a domestic"' and the police had no rights or
power to interfere.
The shocking fact for me was that there
had been a deafening silence on the subject of domestic violence.
All the social agencies knew about domestic violence, but nobody
talked about it. I searched for literature to help me understand
this epidemic, but there was nothing to read except a few articles
on child abuse in medical journals.
So in 1974 I decided to
write Scream Quietly Or The Neighbours Will Hear, the first book in
the world on domestic violence. I revealed that women and children
were being abused in their own homes and they couldn't escape
because the law wouldn't protect them.
If a husband claimed
he would have his wife back, she couldn't claim any money from the
Department of Health and Social Security, and social services could
only offer to take the children into care.
Meanwhile, our
little house was packed with women fleeing their violent partners -
sometimes as many as 56 mothers and children in four rooms. All had
terrible stories, but I recognised almost immediately that not all
the women were innocent. Some were as violent as the men, and
violent towards their children.
The social workers involved
with these women told me I was wasting my time because the women
would only return to their partners.
I was determined to try
to break the chain of violence. But as the local newspaper picked up
the story of our house, I grew worried about a very different
threat.
I knew that the radical feminist movement was running
out of national support because more sensible women had shunned
their anti-male, anti-family agenda. Not only were they looking for
a cause, they also wanted money.
In 1974, the women living in
my refuge organised a meeting in our local church hall to encourage
other groups to open refuges across the country.
We were
astonished and frightened that many of the radical lesbian and
feminist activists that I had seen in the collectives attended. They
began to vote themselves into a national movement across the
country.
After a stormy argument, I left the hall with my
abused mothers - and what I had most feared happened.
In a
matter of months, the feminist movement hijacked the domestic
violence movement, not just in Britain, but internationally.
Our grant was given to them and they had a legitimate reason to hate
and blame all men. They came out with sweeping statements which were
as biased as they were ignorant. "All women are innocent victims of
men's violence," they declared.
They opened most of the
refuges in the country and banned men from working in them or
sitting on their governing committees.
Women with alcohol or
drug problems were refused admittance, as were boys over 12 years
old.
Refuges that let men work there were refused
affiliation.
Our group in Chiswick worked with as many
refuges as we could. Good, caring women still work in refuges across
the country, but many women working in the feminist refuges, about
350, admit they are failing women who most need them.
With
the first donation we received in 1972, we employed a male playgroup
leader because we felt our children needed the experience of good,
gentle men. We devised a treatment programme for women who
recognised that they, too, were violent and dysfunctional. And we
concentrated on children hurt by violence and sexual abuse.
Yet the feminist
refuges continued to create training programmes that described only male
violence against women. Slowly, the police and other organisations were
brainwashed into ignoring the research that was proving men could also be
victims.
Despite attacks in the
Press from feminist journalists and threatening anonymous telephone calls, I
continued to argue that violence was a learned pattern of behaviour from early
childhood.
When, in the mid-Eighties, I published Prone To Violence,
about my work with violence-prone women and their children, I was picketed by
hundreds of women from feminist refuges, holding placards which read: "All men
are bastards" and "All men are rapists".
Because of violent threats, I
had to have a police escort around the country.
It was bad enough that
this relatively small group of women was influencing social workers and police.
But I became aware of a far more insidious development in the form of public
policy-making by powerful women, which was creating a poisonous attitude towards
men.
In 1990, Harriet Harman (who became a Cabinet minister), Anna Coote
(who became an adviser to Labour's Minister for Women) and Patricia Hewitt (yes,
she's in the Labour Cabinet, too!) expressed their beliefs in a social policy
paper called The Family Way.
It said: "It cannot be assumed that men are
bound to be an asset to family life, or that the presence of fathers in families
is necessarily a means to social harmony and cohesion."
It was a
staggering attack on men and their role in modern life.
Hewitt, in a book
by Geoff Dench called Transforming Men published in 1995, said: "But if we want
fathers to play a full role in their children's lives, then we need to bring men
into the playgroups and nurseries and the schools. And here, of course, we hit
the immediate difficulty of whether we can trust men with children."
In
1998, however, the Home Office published a historic study which stipulated that
men as well as women could be victims of domestic violence.
With that
report in my hand, I tried to reason with Joan Ruddock, who was then Minister
for Women. The figures for battered men were "minuscule" she insisted and she
continued to refer to men only as "perpetrators".
For nearly four
decades, these pernicious attitudes towards family life, fathers and boys have
permeated the thinking of our society to such an extent that male teachers and
carers are now afraid to touch or cuddle children.
Men can be accused of
violence towards their partners and sexual abuse without evidence. Courts
discriminate against fathers and refuse to allow them access to their children
on the whims of vicious partners.
Of course, there are dangerous men who
manipulate the court systems and social services to persecute their partners and
children. But by blaming all men, we have diluted the focus on this minority of
men and pushed aside the many men who would be willing to work with women
towards solutions.
I believe that the feminist movement envisaged a new
Utopia that depended upon destroying family life. In the new century, so their
credo ran, the family unit will consist of only women and their children.
Fathers are dispensable. And all that was yoked - unforgivably - to the debate
about domestic violence.
To my mind, it has never been a gender issue -
those exposed to violence in early childhood often grow up to repeat what they
have learned, regardless of whether they are girls or boys.
I look back
with sadness to my young self and my vision that there could be places where
people - men, women and children who have suffered physical and sexual abuse -
could find help, and if they were violent could be given a second chance to
learn to live peacefully.
I believe that vision was hijacked by vengeful
women who have ghetto-ised the refuge movement and used it to persecute men.
Surely the time has come to challenge this evil ideology and insist that men
take their rightful place in the refuge movement.
We need an inclusive
movement that offers support to everyone that needs it. As for me - I will
always continue to work with anyone who needs my help or can help others - and
yes, that includes men.
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