36 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019
A REPORTERAT LARGE
A HOUSE OF THEIR OWN
The transformations of a battered women’s shelter,
from radical feminism to the #WhyIStayed era.BY LARISSA MacFARQUHARLiz at her home in Boston, in June. In 1980, she fled her abusive husband and
went to Transition House. Soon, she was answering the shelter’s hotline.
I
n the winter of 1975, a week after a
ten-inch snowfall, Chris Women-
dez and Cherie Jimenez decided to
turn Cherie’s apartment into a shelter
for women who were getting beaten up
at home. Cherie lived downstairs from
Chris in a building on Pearl Street in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Neither
knew what running such a shelter in-
volved, but nobody did; there was only
one in the country, which had opened
in St. Paul the year before. They were
both on welfare, and each had a little
kid, but rent was cheap, and their apart-
ments were bigger than they needed.
They put up signs with Cherie’s phone
number in laundromats, and the bath-
rooms of broken-bone units in hospi-
tals, and the waiting rooms of mater-
nity wards. Cherie painted a picture on
her wall of a woman brandishing a rifle.
They met a few times with a lawyer
they knew, to ask questions like: What
if a guy found a woman in their apart-
ment and killed her—would they be re-
sponsible? They got some women to-
gether to make plans, but the meetings
were long and kind of boring, so they
decided to just do it.
Chris grew up in the projects in South
Boston. One night in 1966, when she
was seventeen, she went to the Wal-
dorf, a twenty-four-hour restaurant on
Tremont Street where gay people used
to go after the bars closed. She met a
deaf Puerto Rican guy there, got preg-
nant, and married him. Soon after she
gave birth, he started beating her up.
He tried to strangle her and drown her
in the bathtub. She fought back, but he
was stronger. They had terrible argu-
ments, all in sign language. She left him
when she was eighteen and moved back
in with her parents; her mother watched
the baby while Chris went downtownand turned tricks. The money was good,
and she moved to a nice apartment in
Back Bay with a woman she’d been see-
ing who worked as a prostitute, too. She
changed her last name from her hus-
band’s name, Mendez, to Womendez.
Later, around 1973, Chris had a minor
nervous breakdown, became religious,
moved to Cambridge, and found work
moving furniture and delivering the Gay
Community News in her van. Then, one
night, she met Cherie at a Daughters
of Bilitis meeting, and they went out
afterward to a lesbian bar in Boston
called the Saints. They became friends,
and then a couple, and talked every night
about how they wanted to do some-
thing to really turn things upside down.
They thought, There are so many
women getting beat up who need a place
to stay—we should just open our place
up, make it a shelter. They would call
it Transition House.
Cherie, like Chris, had fled a violent
early marriage. When she was a teen-
ager, she went to Puerto Rico with some
friends and met her future husband, a
rich man from San Juan, in a hotel lobby.
They had a daughter together, but he
hit her, and then he became violent
with their daughter, too. She left him
and travelled around for a while, sup-
porting herself and her daughter by
working as a high-end escort. She spent
some time in Mexico City, then stayed
for a summer with friends who had an
organic farm in Michigan. Finally, she
fetched up in Cambridge and met Chris.
Word about the shelter spread fast.
It was Cambridge in 1975, and there was
a lot going on. Women were meeting
for consciousness-raising sessions at the
Sergeant Pepper Coffee House, and
helping rape victims at the Women’s
Center, and starting up the Combahee