In 1971 Erin Pizzey founded Chiswick Women's Aid, the first refuge for battered wives. Her 1974 book "Scream Quietly or the Neighbors Will Hear" brought the issue to the attention of the public.

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Written by Erin Pizzey Friday, April 13, 2007 5:49 AM

I have been putting together my research for a book detailing the birth of the first refuge in the world opened in Chiswick, London in 1971 and the rise of the feminist movement in the Western world.

For this purpose I am going to write bout my first trips to America when I was invited on March 12, 1977 to begin a tour to talk about domestic violence and also to help with the opening of Shelters - as they were called in America.

Soon after I opened my refuge I tried to find information on the subject of domestic violence. There was none. Very little was known about battered children and those discussions were largely confined to medical journals. What went on behind the front door remained there and I was aware as a child immured behind my parents front door and exposed to both their violent and dysfunctional behavior that the subject of family violence was a deep and shameful secret.

Certainly the myth that only the poor, disenfranchised and inarticulate men battered their wives was expounded by the many caring agencies that were supposed to be caring for these families. It was explained to me very early on by a social worker that; ‘he beats her because he loves her and she only recognises his love for her if he hits her.’ This patronising attitude existed because in the sixties and seventies the whole concept of social work was largely practised by middle class women with middle class attitudes. Social work was in its infancy and there was a huge divide between the ‘deserving poor’ and what was then called ‘dustbin families.’ I knew that this was a huge fallacy because my father worked for the British Foreign Office. We lived in big houses with plenty of servants but both my parents screamed, yelled and fought all across the world. My mother had private money and could have gone back to her family in Canada but she preferred to maintain her appalling relationship with my father and the two of them ruined our childhood. My other experience was also that for many years we were left in boarding schools in England. There some of the girls whispered the stories of their sufferings at home. In those days some fifty years ago loyalty to your family was absolutely sacred which is why domestic violence probably remained a silent scream for so long. I particularly remember one girl whose mother shot her father and another case where a girl told some of us that she had been raped by her father and she was expelled by the nuns - silence was enforced.

So I realised that with no literature that I could find on the subject and no where to turn, I had to sit down and try and put a book together in order to get the subject out in the open and to help create other refuges across England.

Scream Quietly or the Neighbors Will Hear was published in 1974, but only after a fight with the Managing Director of the publishing house who demanded that I blame capitalism for wife beating, while I insisted that wife beating was as prevalent in his beloved Russia as it was here. Much to his fury, the book was taken up by The Daily Express Newspaper and overnight the whole subject of domestic violence became national news.

I was aware that the feminist movement were going to wage war against my refuge. From the beginning I employed men and women to work with the mothers and the children. We also had staff who were willing to see any of the men who wanted our help. From the very beginning we had women coming into the refuge who were just as violent as the men they left and they were violent towards their children. We saw these women as most in need of our help. All this ran in direct contradiction of the feminists who insisted that all domestic violence was perpetrated by men.

Other countries were taking copies of Scream Quietly Or the Neighbours Will Hear and photocopying the book in order to open refuges in their own countries. I was in negotiations with American publishers over the possibility of publishing Scream Quietly when I became aware that the book was likely to be politicised and naively I thought that by my cancelling the publication, I could at least protect one source of information from being hi-jacked by the feminist movement. I knew by now, that none of the women in this movement had any interest in the subject of family violence. For the leaders of this new political movement the subject of family violence was merely a high road to funding for their cause - the destruction of the family and of men.

In 1977 Del Martin, a lesbian activist in California, wrote her book Battered Women, and of course she lifted a huge amount of Scream Quietly to bolster her argument that domestic violence was a direct result of marriage. At that time, the lesbian movement within the women’s movements across the world were the most highly organised and vociferous leaders. Heterosexual women were considered traitors to the cause and were guilty of ’sleeping with the enemy.’ I lasted but a few months within the women’s movement in England before I was booted out. Even then I tried to point out that lesbian women were coming to my refuge beaten up by their partners, but I was ignored.

My first tour included a meeting with Professor Murray Straus of the University of New Hampshire, and then next on this extensive tour would be a meeting with Gloria Steinem and lunch at Ms. Magazine. I was already in Ms. Steinem’s bad books because we made film which was to be shown on PBS and she had insisted in fronting it. I was nervous because, yet again, I knew she would use it to batter men, and I was desperate to get the message across that domestic violence was not a gender issue. She threatened that if she was not allowed to front the film, PBS would not show it. I capitulated. Any refuge was better than none. And that was my dilemma in those early days when even to get a refuge open in many countries was a huge enterprise.

Copyright © 2007 Erin Pizzey, All Rights Reserved

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