Applications Of Feminist Legal Theory

The Roots of the Battered Women's Movement: Personal and Political

A ~S~ The Roots ofthe Battered Women's Movement: Personal and Political SUSAN SCHECHTER ... THE FEMINISM which engendered the battered women's movement was itself the product of prior influences. In the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights, anti-war, and black liberation movements challenged the nation. Although not all women who would become feminist activists were involved directly in these struggles, the movements of the 1960s deeply affected the development offeminism. Efforts to win equality for blacks set precedents for women's struggle for equality. As in the nineteenth century, women working against racial oppression came to question their own position -and gained political experience that would help them in building a feminist movement. ... There were, however, many other influences operating upon those who would start or join the feminist movement. Published in 1963, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique captured the discontent of a whole generation of middle class women, caught between aspirations for fulfillment and an ideology that consigned them to the home. Feminism was influenced, too, by women's participation in the paid work force.... Low salaries, limited opportunities, and dead end jobs-juxtaposed to a rhetoric of equality and socialjustice and their families' economic problems-eompelled many to scrutinize their own situation as women. From another direction, thousands ofwomen, committing themselves to fight against poverty through welfare rights organizations and government agencies like the Office ofEconomic Opportunity or the Peace Corps, began to apply newly acquired political insights personally. As women saw others define the solutions to their life problems as political, they were inspired to act.l By the late 1960s and early 1970s, feminism itself had developed into two major branches, a women's rights feminism, exemplified by organizations like NOW, and a women's liberation movement, embodied in socialist feminist and radical feminist groups, and small, autonomous organizing projects working on issues like abortion, women's schools, day care and prisoners' rights. Women's rights activism focused mainly on gaining access to the rights and opportunities held by men. Women's liberReprinted by permission from Women & Male Violence: The Visions and Strategies of the Battered Women's Movement (South End Press, 1982), pp. 29-52. 296 Copyrighted Material The Roots ofthe Battered Women's Movement: Personal and Political I 297 ation encompassed this goal, but went far beyond it, exploring the unequal gender division oflabor and women's lack of control over their bodies, sexuality, and lives.... In addition to fighting discrimination, the women's liberation branch ofthe feminist movement declared that the private and the social were no longer separable categories . By claiming that what happened between men and women in the privacy of their home was deeply political, the women's liberation movement set the stage for the battered women's movement. Through small consciousness raising groups, women, often in fear or shame and then exhilaration, found that what they felt was "petty" or "private " was widely shared. Some of the most energizing topics for consciousness raising focused on previously undiscussed "personal" problems-feelings of isolation in maintaining a home or caring for small children, a sense of physical weakness, intense concern about appearance, the guilty feelings of never doing enough for men and children . In the early women's liberation anthologies and newsletters, articles proliferated on the unequal division of labor within the household, women's responsibilities for child care, the maintenance of rigid sex roles, the internalization of oppression expressed as women's self-hatred, low self-esteem and need for male affirmation, the socialization of women for passivity and caretaking, the continual and degrading sexual objectification by men, and the repression of female sexuality. Although many political, strategic, and ideological differences were evident in the developing women's liberation movement, women agreed that men held power and privilege over women in personal life. Domination was uncovered operating, not only in the public political world, but also in the private political sphere of the family. This analysis moved women closer to a collective realization about violence. Ifwomen were dominated by men both outside and inside the family, women and men no longer had identical interests even within the family unit. Claiming conflicting interests, husband and wife were no longer "one." The importance of this message was twofold. First, women had rights as autonomous human beings which meant that their psychological and physical dignity could be asserted. Secondly, no longer could women be blamed for their own vague sense of dissatisfaction or for their husbands' unhappiness. Women's right to...