Comments Elsewhere

JenK:

I never looked for ‘gay’ men’s shelters, only men’s shelters. There still are no men’s shelters for straight men. … And the second is a hotline, not a shelter.

If you’d bothered to follow the link, you would see that Battered Men’s Helpline has built a shelter providing refuge services to battered men. The scheduled opening was on April 15. In any case, there are several shelters already existing for gay and trans men besides the one I pointed to in Massachussetts and it’s a bit irresponsible to categorically claim that there are no shelters for battered men without having done enough of the basic homework to find this out.

Me:

Primary funding came from local women’s groups, private donors, and some national nonprofit groups like the Ms. Foundation for Women.

JenK:

And where do you think this money came from?

I just told you. From local women’s groups, private donors, and some national nonprofit groups like the Ms. Foundation for women.

Women were not working at this point in large enough numbers to support this. This money came from male donations to charities, or widow’s donations, which amounts to male donations.

You have absolutely no evidence for this claim whatsoever. As it happens, the paid workforce participation rate of women in 1972 (the year that the first modern shelters opened in the United States) was 44% (Source: BLS). That’s fewer women than are in the paid workforce today, but it’s certainly a lot of women with a steady paycheck. If you have some empirical evidence to demonstrate that women were not, in fact, the primary funders of local women’s liberation groups or the Ms. Foundation for Women (for example), you’re free to cite it, but in the meantime I don’t see much reason to take the suggestion seriously.

There is no shame in knowing good men fought along side women for a cause which obviously needed doing. Just as there would be no shame in having good women fight alongside good men.

Nobody denies that “good men” helped in the development of the early battered women’s shelters. However it is quite obvious that men—whether private citizens or men in government—were neither the primary advocates, nor the people actually doing the work of building the shelters, nor the primary funders. Women did that, and (not to put too fine a point on it) feminist women did it. (Some Brits supported the American Revolution; that doesn’t mean it’s inaccurate to say that Americans were the ones who made it.)

The women who fought for these shelters also had free time-they were not working. Men today do not have that luxury. Feminism has always been a white, upper middle class project.

This is, frankly, nonsense. If you would take the time to study the history of the battered women’s movement, you would know that it is nonsense. Most of the early shelters were founded by battered women themselves (Boston’s Transition House, for example, was started in Chris Womendez’s and Cherie Jimenez’s apartment. Womendez and Jimenez had moved in together after fleeing abusive relationships). We are talking about women who fled beatings themselves, worked outside of the house to keep a roof over their heads, and turned over their own apartments and homes to help fellow battered women. (You might point out that they got a lot of help from women’s liberation groups that included many women who had not been battered. That’s true; it’s also true that the women in those WL groups were mostly unmarried and working on their own to keep roofs over their heads.)

I know that you, like most people in our culture, have been given a set of lenses through which to view the history of the women’s movement, and that one of those lenses is the stereotype of feminism as a response to the existential crises of bored white housewives. I think that’s actually uncharitable to Betty Friedan, NOW, and the other liberal feminist targets it’s aimed at, but when I say that feminists build the battered women’s shelter network I don’t mean liberal feminists in the first place. I mean the radical women’s liberation movement. More than one early shelter was formed directly out of a WL consciousness-raising group (the c-r group provided an understanding of battery and also a group of contacts for funding and volunteering). That’s not to say that the radical feminist movement didn’t involve lots of people who had their own forms of privilege; it is to say that if you’re going to try to identify what sorts of privilege aided their success, you’re going to need a different set of templates than the ones you use to talk about NOW and liberal feminism. And if you want to talk about the feminists who played a leading role in the movement to build battered women’s shelters, you are going to be talking about WL, not NOW.

Badger:

Is it not interesting that of all the hate speak quoted above the only person they selected out of all to address was Valerie Solanas. All others were conviently ignored as if they didn’t exist. Says alot.

What it says is that there are diminishing marginal returns to spending a long time discussing each and every quote on a lazily cut-and-pasted “horror file” list of arbitrarily selected quotes from arbitrarily selected women, some of whom are feminists and others of whom aren’t. I’ve already discussed several of these “quotes” elsewhere; besides the Solanas quotes, the list includes several quotes which are dishonestly selective (including at least two quotes that are taken from characters in novels but dishonestly attributed to the author of the novel) and at least one which is completely fabricated. It’s not worth spending a lot of time arguing back and forth about this or that quote and this or that author’s position and influence unless there is a basic level of honesty on the part of the person citing the quotes. So far people spewing out these cut-n-pasted “horror file” lists have not risen to that basic level of honesty.