THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019 43
of the dynamics had to do with race or
class; others were subtler, to do with
personality and friendships. But because
this sort of power was not official, and
barely visible, it could not be curbed or
held to account.
In the early seventies, “The Tyranny
of Structurelessness,” an article by a
Chicago feminist named Jo Freeman,
which was published and republished
in various movement periodicals, ar-
gued that there was no such thing as a
structureless group. The idea of no struc-
ture became, Freeman wrote, “a smoke
screen for the strong or the lucky to es-
tablish unquestioned hegemony over
others.” The strong and the lucky were
not always aware of their power, and in
their ignorance they exerted it all the
more vigorously. In any group, there
were some who laid down the unspo-
ken rules by which the group was gov-
erned, while others couldn’t understand
why they weren’t listened to, or seemed
to speak the wrong language, or felt un-
dercurrents in the room that they
couldn’t name.
There were practical difficulties with
the collective as well. Everything was
shared, everything was loose and un-
defined, so things fell through the cracks.
People missed shifts and neglected tasks,
which was easy to do because everyone
was responsible for everything. Conflict-
ing ideas about what was expected tended
not to emerge until there was a crisis.
Then it would become apparent that the
women in the shelter were more divided
than they’d realized. “There was this un-
said value that you are a feminist so you
were there 24/7,” Sousa says. “You did
whatever was necessary. Once, we were
doing a fund-raising appeal and every-
body was expected to participate, and I
remember one of the women of color
saying, This is not anything I signed on
for. And it wasn’t like, Let’s have a con-
versation about it, it was the white staff
saying, This is part of your job.”
The lack of hierarchy also meant that
it became nearly impossible to make
decisions. The volunteers believed in
the collective, but they were a transient
group—every meeting, some would drop
out and new people would turn up. At
one point, the shelter commissioned
two filmmakers to shoot a documen-
tary about its history, and they filmed
hours of interviews, at enormous ex-
pense; but despite countless meetings
the collective could not agree on what
should be included in the film, and the
project was abandoned. Rules were made
to clamp down on what staff felt was
undesirable behavior—hitting children,
drinking, not helping to clean up, stay-
ing out late—but people who hadn’t
been part of making them didn’t feel as
committed to insuring that they were
enforced. For a while, there was a pol-
icy that a woman could come to the
shelter only three times, because some
women repeatedly returned to their part-
ners, but there were always exceptions.
The women who went back to their
partners drove some of the staff round
the bend. “That was a separatist time,”
Nanette Veilleux, who started volun-
teering at the shelter after college, in
1980, says. “The idea was that if they
just didn’t have men in their lives they
would be fine. The idea that batterers
came in different flavors, and some were
more dangerous than others—we didn’t
let ourselves see that. But the women
who came to our shelter weren’t think-
ing about being separatists—they were
thinking about falling in love again.”
Some women had other issues that
had not been anticipated. One came
into Carole Sousa’s office, saw the “Star
Trek” posters on her wall, and confided
that she had been abducted by aliens
In August, 1976, the year it opened, Transition House helped to organize a march in Boston in support of battered women.
ELLEN SHUB
