THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019 39
be liberated,” Sullivan says. All women
needed was a place to go—a refuge
where they would realize that they could
survive on their own—and then they
would be freed from dependence on
violent men, or any men, forever. The
stories were brutal, but the work was
exhilarating.
Unlike most small feminist organi-
zations founded in the nineteen-seven-
ties, the shelter survived the decade, and
the next, and the ones after that. It is
still open, in a clapboard house in Cam-
bridge with an unpublished address. It
was founded not just to be a refuge for
battered women but to embody a set of
principles and enact a theory of how
women would be liberated. It survived
the seventies because the women who
worked there were so fervently commit-
ted to the theory and the principles, and
it survived after that because, year by
year, they abandoned every one of them.
Each abandonment was the occa-
sion of bitter fights, mutinies, and ac-
cusations of betrayal. For many women
who worked there, Transition House
was their first political love, to which
they attached their most utopian hopes
for the future, and, after all the devo-
tion and the sacrifices and the impas-
sioned arguments and the work day and
night, it was hard to leave its founding
principles behind, no matter how de-
structive they had become. Women left
in anger, or hurt, or from exhaustion, or
because they got older, or it was a differ-
ent time. But the doors stayed open.
I
n the years before Transition House
existed, violence at home was con-
sidered a private matter between hus-
band and wife. In the early sixties, Janet,
an undergraduate at a Seven Sisters col-
lege, had just married Jonathan, who
was in law school. (Both names are
pseudonyms.) Jonathan had started beat-
ing her up almost daily; each time, he
was filled with remorse, but he blamed
Janet for provoking him. Janet had not
known any violence growing up, so she
found the situation disturbing and bi-
zarre and kept it a secret from most
people she knew. She explained her
black eyes with the usual stories about
bumping into things.
She and Jonathan went to see a ther-
apist, who recommended individual
treatment for each of them. Janet’s ther-
apist asked her about her childhood and
concluded that she was a moral ascetic
with a rigid superego, but, in what she
recognized as an undisciplined moment
for a Freudian, he suggested that she
might leave her husband. There were
no practical obstacles to her leaving: she
and Jonathan had no children, and she
would have had no difficulty support-
ing herself. But she loved him. She be-
lieved that he was a decent person with
a few serious flaws. And she believed
in marriage. She told the therapist, I
promised for better or for worse—how
can I leave just because it’s worse?
Jonathan’s therapist saw him for sev-
eral months and conjectured that he was
projecting rage at his mother onto his
wife, or that he had a fear of abandon-
ment owing to insecure attachments as
a child. These theories failed to liberate
Jonathan, however, and the beatings
continued. The contrast between the vi-
olent Jonathan and the penitent Jona-
than was so extreme that the therapist
wondered whether he might be having
seizures, and recommended that he be
evaluated by a neurologist. Jonathan re-
sisted, but the therapist, worrying that
he might kill Janet if nothing were done,
warned him that he would telephone
the dean of his law school if he refused.
The test results were normal.
A little while later, after another vi-
cious beating, Janet fled to the university
clinic. After she returned home, Jonathan
continued to beat her, but less frequently
and severely than before. Then, at some
point, he stopped, and never beat her
again. They went on to have two chil-
dren, they both had professional jobs,
and they shared the housework. They
often had friends over for dinner, none
of whom suspected that they were any-
thing but the perfect couple. But Jon-
athan, though not physically violent,
would still fly into rages, and eventu-
ally he left her. Soon afterward, he mar-
ried again, and, as far as Janet knew, he
was not violent with his second wife.
In the years that followed, Janet con-
tinued to think about her marriage and
wonder what had happened. At first,
under the influence of the Freudian the-
ories that were dominant at the time,
she believed that something in her child-
hood had instilled in her a desire for
punishment and led her to seek out a
violent man. Later, reading systems the-
ory, she concluded that it took two to
create a violent relationship, so there
must have been something in their dy-
namic as a couple. Later still, she read
feminist critiques of systems theory and
decided that the violence had been not
her fault but his. But she never felt that
she’d found an answer to the question
of why he’d done it, since it so clearly
distressed him. “The impulse to be vi-
olent to someone you love, I think, is
not a rare impulse,” she says now. “But
if you ask most men what’s your pre-
ferred way to be with your wife, they’re
not going to say ‘Having her cowering
in a corner while I beat her up.’ Sadists
are rare.” She also asked herself why she
hadn’t fled the marriage when Jonathan
was beating her nearly every day, and
so badly that her therapist feared for
her life. Why hadn’t she left?
In 1979, Lenore E. Walker, a psychol-
ogist, published “The Battered Woman,”
which argued that women in domestic-
violence situations suffered from learned
helplessness. A woman stayed not be-
cause she was a masochist (a then pop-
ular theory), or because she was in some
other way disturbed, but because a bat-
terer’s relentless psychological abuse
convinced her that she was powerless
to escape. The theory of learned help-
lessness was derived from experiments
on dogs. The psychologist Martin Selig-
man had found that, when dogs were
subjected to random electric shocks and
given no option to escape them, they
discovered that nothing they did made
any difference and gave up trying. When
Seligman changed the situation and left
open the door to the cage, Walker wrote,
the dogs had to be repeatedly dragged
out of the cage before they understood
that escape was possible. Repeated bat-
terings, Walker argued, acted on women
like electric shocks. Moreover, when a
woman blamed herself for precipitating
the beatings, this might not be servility
so much as an attempt to believe that
