Feminist Organizing Across the Generations by Karen Bojar

Feminist Organizing Across the Generations by Karen Bojar

Author:Karen Bojar [Bojar, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9781000472820
Google: a4FGEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-11-24T05:28:43+00:00


6 Organizations combatting violence against women

DOI: 10.4324/9781003224143-9

There was considerable overlap between feminist activist organizations and feminist service organizations. Many of the women who started rape crisis centers were advocating for changes in the criminal justice system, and those who started shelters for battered women were advocating for changes in the way law enforcement responded to domestic violence. Similarly, the women who founded and worked in women’s healthcare centers were often advocates for protecting abortion rights. The great strength of second-wave feminism was in the wide range of its organizations and approaches.

The weak spot was its failure to sufficiently address issues of race and class. As the feminist movement grew in the 1970s, both activist groups such as NOW and feminist service providers increasingly grappled with racial differences among women—a particularly urgent issue for the rape crisis movement and battered women’s movement. In the 1970s the majority of the leaders of these anti-violence movements were middle-class white women; on the other hand, many of the women served by their organizations were likely to be low-income women and women of color, whose experiences with the criminal justice system were in general very different from those of middle-class white women.

Women of color who themselves were leaders and staff of organizations serving battered women and who attended meetings of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) reported feeling “excluded from the informal networks in which information and power were shared among white women.”1 Many of the early leaders of organizations formed to combat violence against women were acutely aware of the necessity of also combatting racism if they were to go beyond helping individuals and actually end violence against women. The anti-violence service organizations could not avoid addressing issues of race and class and in general were ahead of advocacy organizations such as the National Organization for Women in confronting the intersection of gender, race, and class. This was also the case for those feminist organizations providing healthcare services. As Susan Schewel, former director of the Women’s Medical Fund, an organization founded to provide low-income women access to abortion, observed: “The Women’s Health Movement was always intersectional—as service providers, from the very beginning, we dealt with a diverse population.”2

What is most striking about the early leaders of feminist service organizations was their vision; they saw themselves as part of a revolutionary movement and many openly identified as such. As Jody Pinto, the founder of Women Organized Against Rape (WOAR), expressed it: “In the sixties and early seventies people really did believe they could change the world.”3 Their commitment to an egalitarian vision was sorely tested during the long backlash against the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Organizations like WOAR demonstrated that it was possible to remain faithful to the group’s core vision at the same as they made adjustments that enabled them to survive the backlash years.



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