All Our Trials by Emily L Thuma

Author:Emily L Thuma
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2019-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

“The State Is in No Way Our Ally in the Struggle against Rape and Battering”

Prisoner solidarity work profoundly influenced feminist radicals who espoused critical positions on law-and-order approaches to interpersonal violence. Corresponding with and publishing the writings of numerous people imprisoned in women’s and men’s prisons throughout the country prompted TTLG and WFWP members to regard criminalization-centered approaches to stemming violence against women as a contradiction in terms. Both groups utilized their newsletter to express this view. In a statement of purpose that often appeared in the opening pages of No More Cages, WFWP decried the marginalization of imprisoned women in “a movement where violence against women has been a primary target of organizing.” The group attributed this situation “to the fact that much of the work in the women’s movement has been done from the perspective of white, middle class women, and so it has not focused on issues primary in the lives of women of color and poor women—and it is exactly these women that make up the majority of women in prison.”121 Collective members reserved particular criticism for white, middle-class feminists who championed physical self-defense for women yet failed to dedicate themselves to organizing efforts for those convicted and incarcerated for killing their batterers and sexual attackers.122 TTLG urged feminists in Seattle who had, in fact, shown support for such women to consider the importance of “visiting and giving support to womyn who are jailed for other reasons…. We can recognize, learn from, and support different womyn’s struggles to survive in this sexist, racist, classist society, without necessarily supporting or advocating the particular choices womyn have made.”123 Similarly, WFWP advocated the view that “ALL prisoners are, in fact, political prisoners.”124

These activists understood themselves as laboring to grasp “where exactly violence against women lives in the midst of a network of oppressions.”125 As Janet Howard of WFWP put it, feminist activists who saw “male domination” as the principal source of “women’s physical oppression … miss seeing other bruises and deep scars.”126 These activists appear to have rejected the notion held by some in the “white dominated women’s movement” that women prisoners simply endured “magnified and intensified” forms of “male oppression.”127 As the newsletters gathered together a plethora of critiques of the racialized and gendered violence of the carceral state, both TTLG and WFWP argued for strategies to challenge interpersonal violence that aligned with their abolitionist visions. In 1978, TTLG reprinted a series of updates compiled by the recently launched Aegis: A Magazine on Ending Violence Against Women on legislative changes in several states that would expand criminal punishment for domestic violence. The collective followed the piece with this critical appraisal:

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