40 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019
she had some measure of control over
what happened to her. Walker’s book
was enormously influential, but Janet
did not feel that it described her situa-
tion. She had never doubted that she
could safely leave if she wanted to. And,
unlike many of the women that Walker
interviewed, she never believed that she
deserved to be beaten—that it was a
husband’s right, or that she had done
something to provoke it.
Years later, once domestic violence
had become an issue that many people
knew about, the question “Why didn’t
she leave?” became a constant irritant to
activists in the battered women’s move-
ment. As if it were that simple! As if you
might not be pursued; as if he might not
kidnap your children; as if you would not
likely be beaten ten times as viciously if
you were caught; as if it were easy to drag
your kids away from their father and
home and friends to live in a shelter; as
if love were not infinitely complicated.
In the fall of 2014, a newly discovered
video showed a professional football
player knocking his fiancée unconscious
with a punch to the head, and many peo-
ple were astonished to learn that she had
stayed with him. In response, on Twit-
ter, women started using the hashtag
#WhyIStayed to explain their own sim-
ilar behavior: they believed divorce was
wrong, they feared being killed if they
left, they thought he would change. And
yet, to those with no experience of such
relationships, physical violence could
seem so foreign, so extreme, that staying
despite it was unfathomable.
Many years after Janet and Jonathan
split up, she became involved in the bat-
tered women’s movement, and then
Transition House, and at one point she
heard something that made sense to her.
“Someone in the movement said, ‘It’s
not about learned helplessness, it’s about
learned hopefulness,’” she says. “And I
think there’s a lot of truth to that. There’s
a kind of resilience that allows you to
think, I can manage this. He keeps say-
ing he’ll change, and he is changing, he’s
gotten a little better. So the hope keeps
you in it.”
C
hris and Cherie lasted eight months
in the apartment on Pearl Street.
Around the time of the Boston march,
they realized that they couldn’t go on
living in a continuous state of emergency,
with no quiet or respite or even room
to sit down, and even their sympathetic
landlord said it was a health hazard to
have so many people living together.
Some radicals from the Women’s Center
wanted to take over an M.I.T. building
by force and set up a shelter there, but
Chris and Cherie didn’t want to get ar-
rested, because they worried that the state
would take their kids. The shelter ended
up renting a house on Elm Street that
had been a shared home for a group of
lesbian socialist feminists who had gone
to Brown. Chris and Cherie worked at
the new place every Sunday night—
they brought donated bread from a
woman-owned bakery, and held a sup-
port group—but they were too burned
out by then to do any more.
The house on Elm Street was only
a temporary fix—Transition House
needed somewhere permanent. A group
of women looked for a place and found
an old six-unit, three-story house that
they bought for twenty-four thousand
dollars. It was in ropy condition, but
it had a lot of rooms, and a back yard
where the children could play. They took
sledgehammers and knocked down the
dividing walls between the units, and
yanked the appliances out of the extra
kitchens. They put up drywall, scrubbed
the floors, washed the windows, and
built a lot of bunk beds.
They set up a small office downstairs;
upstairs there was a room with a phone
where emergency-hotline calls came in,
and an old sleeper sofa for whoever was
on overnight duty. Also upstairs was a
large kitchen and a family room where
people could talk. It was safer to have
those rooms upstairs, they thought—
easier to defend in case of attack. At
first, they made up the beds with pretty
bedspreads that had been donated, and
the place looked homey, but the bed-
spreads were soon taken by women mov-
ing out who had no bedding of their
own, and after a while they weren’t re-
placed. In order to keep beds available
for emergencies, they made a rule that
a woman who came to the shelter should
immediately set about finding an apart-
ment, and either get a job or sign up
for welfare. A single woman was ex-
pected to get all this done and move on
in four weeks; a woman with children
could stay for six.
They agreed that it was crucial to have
women who had themselves been bat-
tered working in the shelter. Their goal
was that at least a third of the staff should
be formerly battered women, a third les-
bians, and a third women of color. The
shelter had started out mostly white, but
everyone thought that it needed to get
more diverse—after all, women of all
races were battered in the same way. The
only type of woman they felt should not
be hired was anyone with a degree in
mental health. Apart from objecting to
psychology’s role in legitimatizing the
notion that women were battered be-
cause they liked it, the shelter staff be-
lieved that battering was not a psycho-
logical issue but a political one: women
were battered because they lived in a
male-dominated society that permitted
it. A political analysis was essential, be-
cause Transition House was not founded
to be a social-service agency—it was a
movement organization. The long-term
goal was not to go on helping battered
women but to change society so that
women were no longer battered.
So many women had turned up to
help after the big march that some kind
of system was needed to organize ev-
eryone. The women wanted to avoid
controlling one another as they had been
controlled by men, so they decided that
the shelter should be a collective. There
would be no leaders, no titles, no struc-
ture, no power dynamics. Decisions
would be made by consensus.
Consensus decision-making was not
a peaceful business, nor was it quick.
Everyone sat in a circle, on chairs or on
the floor, in a room downstairs where
they stored household supplies and do-
nated clothes. There were arguments
and yelling; there were factions and hold-
outs and rivalries; and meetings often
ended without resolution. “You would
have people saying, ‘I feel victimized,’
and that was the big thing you could
pull out in a heated argument if you
wanted to get your way,” Carole Sousa,
who joined the shelter’s staff in the early
years, says. Some who were not used to
yelling were frightened by it, or had not
imagined such a thing would happen
among women. “I didn’t understand at
first, I thought we were sisters—why
are we all fighting?” Wylie Doughty, a
volunteer, says. “And they said, ‘Are you
an only child?’ And I said, ‘Yes,’ and they
said, ‘Well, that’s what sisters do.’”
