42 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019
the women in the class told the others
about Transition House. After the class,
someone suggested that they all go to a
lesbian club in Boston. Liz went along,
but felt so shy that she got very drunk.
When she got home, she told her hus-
band that he shouldn’t mind her hav-
ing gone to the club, because it was all
women, but he locked her and the chil-
dren in a room and beat her and ripped
her clothes in front of them. This time,
she remembered the woman’s story and
thought, I am not trapped after all—
there’s a place I can go. The next day,
she called Transition House and took
her sons and left for good.
Moving to Transition House in 1980
was moving to a different world. Women
there talked about battering as an evil
all women had to fight, not just some
weird, awful thing that had happened
to Liz. They helped her go to court and
take out a restraining order, and per-
suaded her to withdraw money from the
bank. She started answering the hotline
and accompanying other women to court.
There were the long meetings and the
fights, but she loved it all. While she was
at Transition House, she came out as a
lesbian. After a couple of months, she
moved in briefly with one of the women
on staff, whose partner had two boys the
same age as hers. She found jobs to sup-
port herself—cleaning houses, answer-
ing phones at a law office. She went back
to school so that she could eventually
become a therapist. For a while, she was
homeless—she sent her kids to live with
family and she stayed with friends, or
slept in her Volkswagen Bug.
Seven years after she left her hus-
band, he killed himself. In the aftermath,
she and her kids were a mess. Then,
about a year later, she met a woman who
made her kids laugh again. Liz was so
glad to see them warming to someone
new that for the moment it was all she
cared about. She thought, At last, here
is someone for my kids.
Before long, the woman started beat-
ing her. But even though it was hap-
pening, and even though it had hap-
pened to her before, she could not believe
it, because her partner was a woman.
Liz had spent years educating people
about domestic violence and counsel-
ling battered women, and here she was
going through it all over again in her
own house. She kept thinking, She’s a
woman, she’s going to realize how bad
this is. She did not. But Liz stayed with
her for five years. After Liz finally left,
she started volunteering at the recently
formed Network for Battered Lesbians
in Boston, and she discovered that al-
though there were many other women
in her situation, the battered women’s
movement wasn’t talking about it.
At Transition House, everyone be-
lieved that battering was a result of male
domination in a sexist culture, so the
idea that women battered other women
was incomprehensible, and therefore ig-
nored. It wasn’t that they had rigid ideas
about what it meant to be a woman—a
trans woman had come to stay in the
shelter while Liz was there, in the early
eighties, and nobody had thought twice
about it (although the woman made it
so clear that she thought both feminism
and her fellow-residents were stupid
that nobody much liked her). No, it was
the idea of violent women that was im-
possible to understand.
Around the time that Liz was emerg-
ing from her relationship, there was a
lesbian couple working at the shelter
who would get into terrible fights, but
no one thought of it as domestic vio-
lence. “One of the women came in with
bruises because her partner was throw-
ing rocks at her on the beach at P-town,
but we didn’t think this was battering,
because women don’t do that to each
other,” Carole Sousa says. “We thought
they were just having a fight and it got
out of hand.” Soon afterward, the shel-
ter hired a lesbian who said that she had
been in a violent relationship, but still
nobody could believe it. “She would
argue with us, but there was a lot of de-
nial,” Sousa says. “People’s response, in-
cluding mine, was, How could that be?
It threw out the window everything we
knew. It just didn’t make sense.”I
n its first few years, the battered wom-
en’s movement was astonishingly suc-
cessful. The Equal Rights Amendment
failed in 1979, and feminists were still
widely reviled, but stories of violence in
the home upset people whether or not
they believed in women’s lib. By the
early eighties, there were more than
three hundred battered women’s shel-
ters in America. Laws were passed re-
quiring that police arrest batterers; wives
could take out restraining orders againsthusbands; in some places, battered
women were given preference on wait-
ing lists for subsidized housing. But, as
the movement became more established,
its pioneer scrappiness began showing
signs of strain.
Early on, Lisa Leghorn emerged as
Transition House’s spokesperson. She
was young and charismatic and very
angry. She was a passionate speaker, and
started travelling around the country
talking at conferences and movement
gatherings and on TV. She and Betsy
Warrior had been writing about wom-
en’s liberation since the sixties, so she
had theories and language and systemic
analysis. She was spreading the word
and bringing in converts, but she was
also acquiring a public identity outside
Transition House, which was both ad-
mired and begrudged. Some women
told her that she was dominating meet-
ings, that she had to listen more to oth-
ers, even if they didn’t know as much
or work as hard. But things were mov-
ing so fast, and she was on fire, and the
cause was urgent.
It sometimes felt to her that, to some
of the newer volunteers, the work of
the shelter mattered less than the
decision-making process itself. This was
happening in feminist collectives all
over the country—women were being
“trashed” for being too verbal, or too
rational, or because their eloquence was
oppressive. She didn’t know how to turn
things around. Her health began to fail
and she began to suffer from disabling
back pain. Her chiropractor told her
that if she didn’t change her life she
would be dead in a year. Finally, feel-
ing disappointed by the direction the
shelter was taking, and by her own lim-
itations, she left.
There were also deeper dynamics in
the collective that were harder to see.
Some women swayed decisions more
than others—people tended to look at
them when an impasse was arrived at,
or fall silent when they spoke. Women
could feel power shifting around in
meetings, but it wasn’t until years later
that they understood what had been
going on. “At the time, I loved the col-
lective structure because I thought, Ev-
erybody’s equal, everyone has a voice,”
Carole Sousa says. “But people that have
privilege got to move the organization,
and that was never acknowledged.” Some