Welcome to another episode of the continuing series by the DKos Feminist supervixens.
Welcome to the Planet! "Feminist Supervixens", both female and male, are invited to come and participate in this discussion of feminism, women's issues, and anything even tangentially related.
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Previous "episodes" in this diary series have been written by hrh, with guest-host diaries from mem from somerville, Elise, and righteousbabe. Some more guest-hosts are waiting in the wings. Feminists who are interested in being a guest-host can email hrh at: feministsupervixens (AT) yahoo.com
I am your hostess tonight, Irish Witch, and the topic is domestic violence and abuse.
Nearly one-third of American women (31 percent) report being physically or sexually abused
by a husband or boyfriend at some point in their lives, according to a 1998 Commonwealth Fund survey.4
4The Commonwealth Fund, Health Concerns Across a Woman's Lifespan: 1998 Survey of Women's Health, May 1999.
* Thirty percent of Americans say they know a woman who has been physically abused by her
husband or boyfriend in the past year.6
5The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and The National Institute of Justice, Extent, Nature, and Consequences of Intimate Partner Violence, July 2000.
* In the year 2001, more than half a million American women (588,490 women) were victims of
nonfatal violence committed by an intimate partner.7
Fund, July - October 1996.
7Bureau of Justice Statistics Crime Data Brief, Intimate Partner Violence, 1993-2001, February 2003.
http//:www.endabuse.org/resources/facts/Domesticviolence.pdf
Those numbers indicate how widespread domestic violence is in America. But they don't put a human face on the women who endure intimate partner violence. The stories of two women I know well, can do that. I want to share them with you, Kossacks.
These women are what Southerners call Steel Magnolias--gentle, feminine women with spines of steel. They are survivors, and they have survived with their dignity, their capacity to love, and their sense of humor intake.
A and J are sisters (I am using initials to conceal their identities), born to loving parents on a hardscrabble farm in northern Alabama. They were poor, but, as A told me, "everyone was poor, so we didn't know we were." Though the house didn't get indoor plumbing until the sixties, there was a great deal of love and there was always food on the table--vegetables they grew, meat from chickens and pigs they raised. It was a hard life in some ways, with a lot of work to be done, but it was a good one.
J, the eldest sister, is a tall, elegant woman in her mid-eighties. She is always impeccably coiffed and dressed, with snow-white hair and a beauty that shines through despite her age. She has a take-charge attitude and age hadn't dimmed that one bit. She left home to get on-the-job training as dietician, and was so successful she ended up running the dietary program for a large change of nursing homes n the South. She married and raised two children who have been equally successful in their careers. She lived in a lovely home she decorated with her own excellent taste.
Sounds good so far, doesn't it?
Unfortunately, the father of her children didn't deserve her. Like many smart, lovely women, she picked a real loser. He was a police officer in Birmingham, a bigoted redneck (yes, I know that's a derogatory term, and I meant it to be insulting because he fits the stereotype and then some) who could have been the model for Rod Steiger's hateful sheriff in the Sidney Poitier film In the Heat of the Night. In fact, her husband participated eagerly in beating peaceful civil rights marchers, because he was a racist who despised anyone who want a WASP.
We don't know if he was physically violent to J, but it's a likely possibility. Proud woman that she is, she wouldn't have told anyone. We do know that he was verbally and emotionally abusive to her, because he didn't control his mouth in front of family. Emotional abuse can do enormous psychological damage, but somehow she survived it. We also know that he all but disowned his son, when he came out to the family. He spent the last few years of his life bed-ridden, which didn't improve his disposition a whit, and J tended him faithfully throughout. When he died, she buried him in the family plot, sold the house, and moved into Birmingham. About a year later, she had him reburied in a cemetery that was closer to her home, ostensibly so she could visit his grave more easily.
Except, you see, the cemetery she buried him is primarily African-American--affluent, middle class African Americas, but still African American.
The redneck sheriff is sleeping the sleep of the unjust surrounded by the those he hated, despised and took pleasure in beating while he was alive.
Now THAT is revenge, as only a steel Magnolia can dish it out. She is the sort of woman Stephen Vincent Benet had in mind when he wrote of ladies who "propped the South with a swan's down fan."
Would it have been better had she left and taken her children with her? Certainly. But this Alabama in the forties and fifties and sixties, and she had been taught all her life that marriage was forever, and that a good wife obeyed her husband. If the marriage turned out to be a prison--well, you'd made your bed, and you lay in it.
A had a very different life. At 13, she dropped out of school to go to work. (she eventually got her GED and at 67, went back to a technical school to get a certificate in early childhood education). At 20 or so, she met and married her first husband, a soldier. He was a handsome man, and very intelligent and charming, like many abusers. They were happy for a while, and she enjoyed being stationed in Alaska. But she was homesick, and they ended up moving back to Alabama.
Her sisters and brothers were all having children, and she wanted a real family, too. She gave birth to a son and daughter a year apart--my husband and his older sister. They really shouldn't have had children so quickly. It put a huge financial strain on them, as her husband tried to make his way through college, and he was short-tempered and angry. There was no excuse for his behavior, however, no matter how tight the money was. She became his punching bag. So did the children, especially my husband.
He was also a control freak. Even though he made a decent salary in the medical profession, he would dole out a few dollars at a time. He refused to believe my husband needed glasses, even though a vision test at school revealed it, and so Ben had to wait until he got a job at age 13, in order to buy them. He would give them tasks, and if they weren't accomplished to his satisfaction (almost impossible to do), he'd haul them out of bed on a school night to do it over. He beat them and his wife, and there was nothing she could do to prevent it.
Several times, she left him and went to her parents' for help. But even they doubted her (when she finally did leave permanently, her mother asked her oldest daughter if she wasn't exaggerating or making it up), because, sweet and gentle people that they were, they couldn't imagine a man treating his family that way.. This was the 50s and 60s. There weren't any shelters to go to, and domestic violence wasn't talked about. It was the dirty little secret that lurked behind the closed doors of suburban homes. And if it was discussed, women were told to go home and accept it, especially in the fundamentalist South, where a woman learned from birth that she was to submit to and obey her husband--the bible said so, after all. Besides her husband was such a charming, friendly, wonderful guy--someone like that, well-respected medical professional, couldn't possibly hit a woman. You had to wonder if perhaps J also tried to leave, and wasn't believed.
The biggest problem A faced was her lack of job skills and education. Even if she left, she couldn't support herself and her children, and she had no intention of leaving them to her husband's tender mercies. With her children's help (the oldest were now in their teens), she got hold of a building that had been abandoned for years. She and her children cleared kudzu from the rooms where it had spread through broken windows. They scrubbed and painted plastered, until they turned a wreck into an inviting place. A opened her first pre-K.
The school was a success. She's worked in the field for many years. Today her pre-K has a waiting list of nearly 200 children for 80 places. Parents who had her as a teacher when they were children will put their newborn on the waiting list--that is how well-loved she is in this small GA town.
And with financial success, she found the courage to leave him.
Here revenge? Nothing so spectacular as J's which is likely the best vengeance story I've ever heard (even better than the divorcee who, while her husband was on his month--long honeymoon with her replacement, sewed shrimp into the curtains and cushions of the vacation home she had loved and her husband had kept out of spite).
No, A's was quieter, less flamboyant, as she is. She simply built herself a tranquil, happy life, one filled with hard work but also a great deal of satisfaction. Every one of her children adores her, and so do her grandchildren. Her business, as I said, flourishes . She has a lovely home (from which I am now writing this) that is the most welcoming place I've ever seen. She still works twelve hour days--because she wouldn't know what to do with herself if she retired; she needs to be busy, and she adores children.
Meanwhile, the abusive husband she left, cannot understand why his children never come to see him or call him. The only one who does is my husband, ironically the one he beat the most. He is a sick, sad , lonely old man whose emphysema makes even walking difficult. And he still has never asked his children to forgive him--or even admitted to himself that what he did went well beyond parental discipline and into horror story territory.
Living well truly is the best revenge.
Today, women like A and J would have somewhere to turn. There are shelters. There are programs to help a wife who has no job skills to become employable. There is welfare to tide her over while she rebuilds her life. Thank God for these choices, because neither A nor J had them. When they left, they were not believed, and there was nowhere to go They are the human face of this terrible problem. Remember them, when you think of battered women. Remember that a woman with several small children may not know where to turn, even now, especially if she comes from a background that teaches her that wife should be submissive to her husband, and that if she is beaten, she deserves it. Remember that abusive husbands often isolate their victims from friends and family, and keep control of the finances--you can't run if you don't have money for gas or the bus, and if you nowhere to run. Remember that women are more likely to be killed after they leave their abuser--and that many times, that abuser has threatened to kill them or their family if they try to leave.
What can we do about this problem?
* Support shelters and hotlines in your area. They always need money and volunteers. There is never enough room for all the women who need help.
* Work to elect representatives at the national, state and local levels who will support legislation to keep programs running and shelters funded and who will create better laws against battering.
* Reach out to any woman you know who may be caught in an abusive relationship
* Work to get rid of judges and law enforcement officers who refuse to enforce the law, or who are prone to giving perpetrators a slap on the wrist as a sentence.
* Make sure that children are taught that violence is not okay. That is our first line of defense.
* Make sure your representatives know that you support fully funding VAWA (Violence Against Women Act of 2005)
* Fight the notion that women aren't believable, no matter how many broken bones or bruises they have--it's an ugly truth, but often when call the police, unless they are half-dead, the police look the other way. Thanks to education programs, that's improving, but it still exists--and a lot of police officers are abusers themselves. The best law on the books is useless unless it's enforced. The same is true of the military, which has a rate of DV 3-5 times that of the civilian population.
And if you or someone you know is caught up in the cycle of violence, give them this information:
National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) or TTY 1-800-787-3224.
To learn more, here are some links:
http://www.ncadv.org/
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/...
http://www.ndvh.org/
http://www.s-t.com/...
A link to my diary on DV in the military:
http://www.dailykos.com/...