Violence Against Women
This text is planned to give examples of aims and projects supplementing the lemma Radical Feminism. It should certainly not replace the existing lemma Violence against Women, but describes only the "radical feminist" thinking in it and to where this led. I have already contacted other wikipedians to give me advice.
Violence Against Women
It seems that it were the radical feminist women who first addressed violence against women. No other "wave" of the movement women engaged so decisively to intervene the many forms of violence against women: It was not until the 1970s that women began to speak publicly about the violence they endured. Taking their own experiences seriously, they dared to break taboos and publicize crimes that had been hooded and tolerated for centuries. Radical feminist thinking created innovations, which were then co-opted by state-funding.
International Tribunal on Crimes against Women
The American sociologist Diana E.H. Russell and Nicole Van Den Ven managed in 1976 with a small group and minimal resources to conduct the International Tribunal on Crimes against Women in Brussels with participants from 40 countries reporting. The proceedings of the tribunal[1] show already a wide spectrum: Rape/ Battering / Forced Incarceration in Mental Health Hospitals and Marriage / Femicide / Clitoridectomy / Excision and Infibulation / Violent Repression of Nonconforming Girls / Torture of Women for Political Ends / Brutal Treatment of Women in Prison. Forced Motherhood / Compulsory Non-Motherhood / Persecution of Non-Virgins and Unmarried Mothers / Crimes Perpetrated by the Medical Profession / Compulsory Heterosexuality: Persecution of Lesbians / Crimes Within the Patriarchal Family / Economic Crime / Dual Oppression by Family and Economy / Double Oppression of Third World Women / Double Oppression of Immigrant Women / Double Oppression of Women from Religious Minorities / Sexual Objectification of Women.
Women's shelter – started as tiger …
The US-Sociologist Carol Hagemann-White asks how all those Women's shelters emerged at the same time in so many places: “One of the effects of the Tribunal on Crimes against Women was a tremendous increase in the Women's shelters in Europe.” She states, that the founding feminists “felt more identification than pity, and consequently indignation, anger, determination to put an end to the humiliation of women. They made their experiences outside the institutions that socialize professional "helpers" and in which these reactions are sanctioned as "naïve". The feminist postulate of commonality among women created the frame for these experiences, but was also confirmed by them, since violence in marriage and abuse by men evoked participants' own life-long experiences of fearing male violence and rape.”[2] Myra Marx Ferree observed: “The term chosen (...) in West Germany was simply Frauenhaus (women's house), stressing the commonality of helpers and helped, rather than the "shelter" (US) or "refuge" (UK) language preferred in liberal political contexts. It was understood not as a resource filling a gap in state services, but as a site in which participants would be collectively empowered.”[3] Because the first women's shelter (in West Germany) was autonomous and not part of the social economy, the “battered wives” learned to step out from the role of the "client", the victim, and help each other. That was a crucial aspect of feminist therapy: regaining dignity. The “The Power of Men is the Patience of Women” is a docudrama, a re-enactment by women from the Berlin women's shelter; the movie shows how they regained strength and supported each other.[4] “In Berlin, the first Frauenhaus budget was almost half a million DM per year for three years. It was even more remarkable that they won support on their own terms, since the projects' principles were very unlike those of state bureaucracy. Feminists insisted on doing their own hiring and on nonhierarchical pay criteria for the women who worked there, rather than state pay scales, and they refused to keep records of who used their services lest it lead to stigmatizing them.”[5] “Relative to the United States, West German Frauenhäuser retained a great deal of administrative control over their internal structure and process. US feminists relatively quickly accepted extensive professionalization, state-defined rules of eligibility and pay, and formal divisions of labor as being the price of funding, and they lost both credit for and control over their shelters.”[6]
…landed as bedside rug
The lure and problems of state funding both became acute in the mid-1980s, as feminist projects sprang up to address a profusion of needs and clienteles. State financing spread to women's centers, supporting health and education projects that the German welfare state interpreted as fulfilling its mandate to help and protect women. Feminists complained about insufficient financial support, yet emphasized how much their dependency on the state's dough (Staatsknete) threatened the autonomy of their movement. (..) The ethic of care collided with the principle of autonomous choice. Long-engaged feminists deplored what they saw as an emergent subculture embracing gender stereotypes: "A women's project seemed particularly open to the expectation that it would provide a large motherly presence that could take care of all worries and problems."[7] “Spurred in part by transnational discourses from women of color, minority group women in West Germany offered critiques of project practices as inconsistent with feminist claims to give all women an autonomous voice. Some migrant women drew their ideas from the writings of US and UK Black feminists, especially Audre Lorde who visited Berlin.[8]
Self defense
Searles and Berger come in their case study on Self defense to the conclusion, that “self-defense is an inherently more radical component of the antiviolence movement both because it aims at prevention and because it seeks to challenge the legitimacy of traditional gender roles. Since feminist self-defense training promotes an alternative view of women as strong, capable, and self-reliant, it does not reinforce the traditional patriarchal family structure that emphasizes women's passivity, deference, and dependence on men.”[9] [10] [11] Searles und Berger describe also the limitations of the movement due to "radical feminism": “The self-defense movement has not experienced the co-optation of feminist principles and the service orientation that has characterized the battered women and anti-rape movement.”[12]
Rape crisis centers
Anti-rape activists began organizing at the grassroots level, forming the first Rape crisis centers (RCC). Among the first was the Washington D.C. Rape Crisis Center, founded in 1972 by women identifying with the radical branch of the women’s movement. The D.C. RCC published a pamphlet entitled How to Start a Rape Crisis Center, which provided a model for other early RCCs to follow.[13] In the beginning volunteers provided services for rape survivors, but later the RCCs professionalized and cooperated with police, hospitals and social services.
Take Back the Night
One of the first Take Back the Night marches was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in October 1975, after the murder of a microbiologist, Susan Alexander Speeth, who was stabbed to death while walking home alone.[14] On March 1st 1977 a feminists organized in West Berlin a first demonstration at night following two murders on women walking home at night.[15] In West Berlin marches to Take Back the Night were repeated every year on 30. April – called Walpurgis Night.[16]In the same year 1977 first marches to Take Back the Night were staged in England too.
Lucida 20:06, 27 April 2019 (UTC)
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- ↑ [1]
- ↑ Carol Hagemann-White: Die Frauenhausbewegung (1988) in Ilse Lenz (ed.): Die Neue Frauenbewegung in Deutschland (2010) ISBN 978-3-531-17436-5 Search this book on
. p.292
- ↑ Myra Marx Ferree: Varieties of Feminism German Gender Politics in Global Perspective (2012) ISBN 978-0-8047-5759-1 Search this book on . p.95
- ↑ Marc Silberman: Women's Movement art, Jump Cut, no. 29, February 1984, pp. 52
- ↑ Myra Marx Ferree: Varieties of Feminism German Gender Politics in Global Perspective (2012) ISBN 978-0-8047-5759-1 Search this book on . p.95
- ↑ Myra Marx Ferree: Varieties of Feminism German Gender Politics in Global Perspective (2012) ISBN 978-0-8047-5759-1 Search this book on . p.96
- ↑ Margit Brückner und Simone Holler: Frauenprojekte und soziale Arbeit, eine empirische Studie (1990) P.43
- ↑ Myra Marx Ferree: Varieties of Feminism German Gender Politics in Global Perspective (2012) ISBN 978-0-8047-5759-1 Search this book on . p.99
- ↑ Patricia Searles and Ronald J. Berger: The Feminist Self-Defense Movement: A Case Study in Gender and Society, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Mar., 1987) p.79
- ↑ Hooks, Bell 1984, 1984. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press.
- ↑ Martin, Del. 1976, Battered Wives. San Francisco: Glide Publications.
- ↑ Patricia Searles and Ronald J. Berger: The Feminist Self-Defense Movement: A Case Study in Gender and Society, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Mar., 1987) p.69
- ↑ Maria Bevacqua, Rape on the Public Agenda: Feminism and the Politics of Sexual Assault (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000), pp.74-75
- ↑ "Students 'Take Back the Night' on Columbia streets". themaneater.com.
- ↑ Ilse Lenz (ed.): Die Neue Frauenbewegung in Deutschland (2010) ISBN 978-3-531-17436-5 Search this book on . p.295
- ↑ [2]
