place they could go with their children—and few mothers were willing to leave marriages without their
children. A program originating in England, shelters were opened by American feminist groups starting in
- Thousands of women volunteered to staff these facilities and to raise money for them. National
coordination produced shared policies: no men allowed; locations not made public; no drugs or alcohol;
all residents cooperating in cleaning and maintenance; and consciousness-raising sessions aimed to
expose residents to the feminist understanding that domestic violence was a means of enforcing male
dominance and erupted most often when that dominance was threatened. “Hotlines” also proliferated,
allowing women to learn that support was available. Feminist groups pressured medical clinics to post
information about getting help, and doctors to raise questions about injuries they would once have ignored
—or accepted pretexts about, such as “I ran into a door.” Feminist pressure caused police forces to
change their responses to domestic violence calls: instead of acting to separate the couple and pacify the
man—or, worse, sympathize with man’s complaints about the woman—most police departments have
revised their procedures, and twenty-two states have made arrests mandatory.
A marker of the feminist achievement was the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act of 1984,
which provided federal grants. (Since then there has been a political seesaw: Democratic administrations
supported the program, and the Clinton administration added the Violence Against Women Act;
Republican administrations cut the funding and tried to repeal the laws.) Although these government
commitments represented major feminist victories, their funding does not match the need. Every day
approximately ten thousand needy women and children ask for help but cannot get it because of
inadequate funding. Twenty-three thousand calls come in to anti-violence hotlines every day. An
additional problem is that accepting federal money requires shelters and hotlines to conform to guidelines
that often prohibit feminist discussions with victims, which many activists believe weakens their ability to
help women permanently free themselves from violence through understanding its roots and symptoms.
Men can also be victims, especially gay men, and it has often been difficult for male victims to report this,
because it makes them feel humiliated and weak; about two thousand several networks have been
established to support them, such as the Gay Men’s Domestic Violence Project.^36
The feminist campaign against violence against women worked not only to protect women and
children but also to support research and analysis of the problem. For example, it is now well known that
abuse often occurs when a woman tries to separate from her partner; and that many abusive relationships
begin with a very controlling, even imprisoning, partner. One woman’s story: The husband of a woman
I’ll call Sheila would not permit her to work outside the home or do anything independent. Each day when
he left for work, he recorded the odometer reading on the car and took the phone with him. His need to
control became so extreme that he started to dish out her food portions, telling her that she needed to lose
weight. He became violent when he suspected any resistance from her. She finally prepared to escape
with her three children after getting advice from a feminist hotline in rural California, whose staff told her
to gather up her important papers, such as the kids’ medical records, bank and insurance information, and
personal keepsakes in case she could not go back to the house, which turned out to be true.