Soon these activists formed a national organization, the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against
Sterilization Abuse (CARASA), based on a simple but radical premise: that women should have the right
to decide their reproductive options without coercion. CARASA argued that women needed not only legal
but also economic and social rights. Giving women true choice, the group argued, should include
economic help in raising children when necessary and in accessing contraception and abortion when
desired. CARASA was able to get the federal government to issue stringent regulations designed to
prevent involuntary sterilization in 1979, including notably a required thirty-day waiting period to ensure
that women were not pressured into a decision under stress. It never succeeded, however, in repealing the
federal ban on Medicaid funding for abortion.
Poster, probably from CARASA (Committee fo Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse), probably 1974–75, designer unknown.
Women’s bodies have been violated for centuries by rape, harassment, and assault, and by the relative
impunity of so many male culprits. The size of the problem before the women’s liberation movement is
unknown, precisely because so few women complained, which was, in turn, because they knew their
chances of getting justice were slim. The all-out feminist campaign against domestic violence generated a
sea change in public opinion. Women as well as men once regarded male “punishment” of wives as
acceptable and did not categorize such aggressions as pushing, slapping, or threatening as constituting
domestic violence, let alone criminal assault. Shortly before the women’s liberation movement, anywhere
from one-quarter to two-thirds of Americans thought such “mild” assaults acceptable or even, in male
opinion, necessary or good. Today very few Americans would admit such an attitude to a pollster. Still,
the problem has not disappeared by any means. The Domestic Violence Resource Center estimates that
one in four women has been attacked by a partner or ex-partner and three out of four women know
someone who has been. Every day in the United States, three women and one man are killed by partners
or ex-partners. Of course, these figures represent both greater consciousness that these assaults are crimes
and greater willingness to report them.^35
One approach to domestic violence was the establishment of battered women’s shelters throughout the
United States. In 2012, on an average day, some 1,900 shelters served an average of sixty-four thousand
women and children, and twenty-nine thousand more were counseled. African American women are
disproportionately likely to use shelters because they lack the resources to find housing on their own
when they leave abusive partners. No such refuges existed before the women’s liberation movement
created them, and no physical space ever met a greater need. Many abused women had previously had no