Frenemies by Nancy Whittier

Author:Nancy Whittier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

The Violence Against Women Act and Ambivalent Alliances

When Senator Joseph Biden proposed the Violence Against Women Act in 1990, mass feminist mobilization had waned, but the national women’s movement organizations that remained were highly organized, professionalized, and relatively well-funded. Organizations like the National Organization for Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund (henceforth NOW-LDEF) had built connections with primarily Democratic lawmakers on other issues, like workplace and education discrimination (Banaszak 2010; McBride and Parry 2011). These connections paid off, as NOW assembled a broad coalition of movement organizations to help write VAWA and lobby for its passage, which they achieved in 1994. These activists formed a close working relationship not only with key Democratic members of Congress and their staff but also with Republican cosponsors, including some of the most conservative members. There were two alliances across ideological difference in Congress around VAWA. First, fairly common, was the bipartisan group of conservative and liberal lawmakers who sponsored and supported VAWA. Second, less common, was the relationship between feminist organizations working on the law and the conservative members of Congress who promoted and ultimately supported it. Not simply a lobbying relationship, the latter involved lawyers and advocates from NOW working closely with conservative members of Congress and their staff to organize hearings and build support for diverse parts of the law.

The participants in this relationship were undeniably allies, but they were ambivalent ones, wary of the other side and supporting VAWA for different reasons. Conservatives and many liberals in Congress sought to be tough on crime and to protect women from what they came to see as the shockingly common and serious problems of domestic violence and rape. Feminist members of Congress and outside feminist advocates emphasized the need to take domestic violence and rape seriously; to improve the often sexist and dismissive response by law enforcement, medical professionals, and society at large; and to empower women and their advocates. Conservatives’ larger goals were improving public safety, punishing criminals, and reinforcing strong families. Feminists’ larger goals were reducing the systematic victimization of women and addressing a key dimension of women’s oppression, which related not only to how individual women were treated but also to how institutions responded to assaults against women. Bridging these differences, a hybrid frame developed in Congress, a mash-up of feminist and crime discourses that could be understood and deployed in different ways by different sides. This frame promoted VAWA’s success by enabling cross-ideological alliance, but, as we will see, it could not accommodate some important feminist goals.

While we might expect that the alliance in Congress would be paralleled by a similar connection between feminists and conservatives outside the state, it was not. Feminists supported VAWA, while conservatives opposed it, albeit both weakly. Like pornography, VAWA was somewhat controversial among feminists, with some criticizing it for its criminal justice dimensions and the kinds of connections and oversight it prescribed between service organizations, like shelters and rape crisis lines, and government institutions, like police and courts. Others objected to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.