38 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019
River Collective. There were biker fem-
inists in leather, and Cambridge femi-
nists in bandannas, and Dorchester fem-
inists in dresses. There were socialist
feminists who believed that all victim-
ized groups should struggle together
against capitalism, and radical feminists
who believed that misogyny was the
fundamental oppression—that if the
patriarchy could be broken then all other
oppressions would follow.
Cherie and Chris opened their shel-
ter on New Year’s Day, 1976, and it was
full almost immediately. There were mat-
tresses stacked up in the kitchen and all
over the floor, and children everywhere.
The women who came to stay all pitched
in, cleaning the house, taking donations,
answering the phone, which began ring-
ing constantly, helping out with child
care while mothers went to the doctor
or the housing office. A lot of women
showed up at the apartment to help.
One was Betsy Warrior, a former bat-
tered woman who was a founding mem-
ber of Cell 16, a radical feminist group
whose journal, No More Fun and Games,
advocated celibacy, separatism, and wages
for housework. Another was Lisa Leg-
horn, an ardent young student who had
met Warrior in Cell 16 and spent time
with her studying social movements.
(They concluded that the basis of wom-
en’s subjugation was their place as un-
paid laborers in the home, reinforced
through violence.) There was Rachel
Burger, who had grown up in a pacifist
Anabaptist community in England and
Paraguay, and, having seen abuse that
nobody talked about in that community,
had gone looking for another. There
were housewives from the suburbs who
turned up carrying homemade cakes.
The idea was that there should be no
difference between women who came
to stay and women who came to help.
They made decisions together, went on
protest marches together, went out drink-
ing and dancing. “We were changing
consciousness,” Leghorn says. “A woman
would come into the shelter in the morn-
ing, and by the evening she was show-
ing a new resident around. Women were
learning that they weren’t just victims.”
Nobody wanted to make rules or con-
trol behavior; the only rule was to keep
the shelter’s location a secret. Chris and
Cherie had almost no money, but they
were determined not to fund-raise from
any source other than individual women,because doing so would compromise
their independence and their politics.
Chris and Cherie worked around the
clock, taking naps when they could.
There were a lot of people and a lot of
frantic emotions in a small space. Ev-
eryone was in crisis, panicking about
where she was going to go next. One
woman kept begging Chris to kill her,
and Chris would say, Not today, honey,
maybe tomorrow. A volunteer went to
help a woman escape from her house
and got beaten up herself. Some of the
women had not been battered but had
come because they were homeless; Chris
and Cherie couldn’t decide what to
do about them. Some days, when the
weather was nice, all the women would
take a picnic out to the back yard and
the kids would play and everybody would
be at peace for an hour or two.
In August that first year, Transition
House helped to organize a women’s
march that rallied at Government Cen-
ter, in Boston. Five thousand people
turned up. Leghorn spoke passionately
about female servitude. Florynce Ken-
nedy, the founder of the Feminist Party,
advised battered women to occupy the
nearest cathedral, mosque, or synagogue,
because religions had been “pushing
the family trap” and had taken upon
themselves “a monopoly on the license
to fuck.” Afterward, dozens of women
showed up at the shelter to volunteer.
Many volunteers had been activists
in the civil-rights and antiwar move-
ments but had got sick of being ignored
and making coffee. Gail Sullivan had
just come back from a stint at the
Wounded Knee defense committee, in
South Dakota. “The movement was
dominated by men who were actively
hostile to feminism, which they termed
‘white feminism,’” Sullivan says. “Most
were very invested in traditional gender
roles, which they defended as Native
American traditions. This stuff was very
common, men using racial oppression
as an excuse to oppress women.”
Domestic violence felt like the front
line of the liberation struggle. “When
we started to understand how deeply
pervasive and corrosive it was, when we
heard stories from women whose father
beat their mother and then they repli-
cated that in their own relationship, it
felt like the work was so central to cre-
ating a world in which women could