I grew up in a small Texas town in a matriarchal family in the mid-1950s to the early 70s. My grandmother, Beulah, was a hairdresser by day and a cattle rancher by night. Over the years, I watched her change women’s hair color and style as she’d slip them some money to get out of town unnoticed because they had married “one of those.” Everyone knew what that meant.
A year out of high school, on Juneteenth, I went to work for Texas Instruments, a factory filled 24/7 with women churning out the chips for calculators and computers and parts for bombs. It wasn’t unusual to see a woman come to work with a black eye.
One night, my co-worker Yvonne didn’t come to work. In fact, she never came in or called in again. Two weeks after she had gone missing, her husband took the police to the dry well out in the pasture where he had dumped her limp body while her children waited in his pickup truck. He had beaten her to death with a frying pan.
None of us had known that Yvonne had married “one of those.”
A year or so later, based upon my class participation, I was told by one of my college professors that I was a feminist. I had no idea what that meant. She invited me to join the local chapter of the National Organization for Women to help them start a rape crisis hotline. I told her about Yvonne, what I had seen growing up in a beauty shop and working at Texas Instruments, and encouraged her to expand the effort to include women who were being beaten by their boyfriends and husbands. A psychologist and a social worker were soon added to provide us with training on crisis intervention. A local after-hours answering service donated their service to us and allowed us to use their number for our hotline. And so began the Grayson County (TX) Women’s Crisis Line.
We had flyers printed with the hotline number and the statement, “No one has the right to hit you.” The answering service called down our list of volunteers until they found someone home who could respond to the call. If a woman was battered or in fear of her partner, we would call her back, lend an ear, and help her develop a safety plan. If the woman had been raped, we went directly to the emergency room to be with her and provide whatever support we could. If she went to court, we accompanied her.
The youngest victim I saw was four years old. I will never forget the frozen stare in her eyes and the single tear balanced on her cheek as the ER staff prepared her for emergency surgery to repair the damage her grandfather caused. Her grandmother stood in the hallway, blaming her daughter for running to the corner store to buy a pack of cigarettes while leaving the little girl alone with him.
The oldest victim was 80. She had the very same stare in her eyes. She could not stop shaking. She could not utter a word. This woman had been asleep when a man broke into her senior living apartment in the middle of the night and raped her.
What words could we have uttered that would adequately describe what women and girls experience at the hands of the men who profess their love for them or overpower them in the dark? Eventually, we used the shorthand phrases “rape victim, rape survivor, battered woman, abused child, incest survivor.”
What I came to learn from the consciousness-raising groups I attended, that resonated with what I’d seen and experienced over my quarter of a century on the planet, was that these were women and girls who had survived overt misogyny, a direct blow from the hammer of sexism, only to be blamed or shamed for the violence done to them.
Because our fledgling group of women dared to stand with them, we were called “man-hating, ball-busting, castrating, lesbian bitches” (turned out, a couple of us were lesbians), who were determined to destroy both church and family. In actuality, we were motivated by a visceral unwavering belief that women were people too, and therefore, deserving of equal rights and an end to the violence systematically waged against them in their homes, on the street, and in the workplace. The wave of awareness and activism sweeping over us at that time was sweeping across the country and other parts of the world as well.
We were naïve in the beginning. We thought the police must not be aware of this violence and abuse. All they needed was education. Surely our local legislators would provide funding for a home that women and children could turn to for safety so they could begin anew. However, we quickly learned what we were up against.
During this same period, many of us were also fighting for abortion rights, LGBT rights, for justice and peace in Central America and an end to the war in Vietnam, for racial justice, and for fair wages, and for an end to poverty – all in our spare time. We infiltrated political parties and began to see gains. Then, the AIDS epidemic hit hard. We were there to care for our gay brothers who were abandoned by their families, and we called on our government to respond.
We had no map, no path, no down time, no breaks, no safety net, no dipping in and out, no professional positions with paychecks, no funders, no prestige, no career path, no guarantees. And of course, there were no cell phones, no computers, no internet.
We had the inspiration of our grandmothers and so many who had gone before us against all odds… Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, Lucretia Mott, so many others. We thought of our early work when we had no shelters as an underground railroad where we would take women and their children into our homes and move them to someone else when it was no longer safe for them to stay where they began.
It was 1984 when my boss at Texas Instruments started a reserve police unit. He challenged me to join. He laughingly said we could be the “feminist and the fuzz.” I thought maybe it would be a way to build a bridge between the Women’s Crisis Center and law enforcement. I agreed to at least go through rookie school. One night, the county sheriff came in to teach a class. He asked what I was doing there. I told him I was learning to be a cop. Shocked, he asked if I was serious,
then said he knew who he would call the next time he had a rape call – me. And so, I spent my days working at Texas Instruments and my lunch breaks, evenings, nights, and weekends answering hotline calls and volunteering as a police officer.
Then in 1985, I began to look for full-time work addressing what had come to be labeled “domestic violence.” Every Sunday, I drove an hour to Dallas to get The New York Times, and one day, I found an ad seeking an executive director for the Yonkers Women’s Task Force. They were looking for an MSW, which I wasn’t. (I applied anyway, figuring it would only cost a quarter for the postage.) I was surprised when they responded and gave me a date and time for an interview at an address on South Broadway in Yonkers. (I had no idea where Yonkers was located). Turns out, what they were looking for fundamentally was a feminist who possessed the skills to run a small nonprofit organization that primarily operated a domestic violence shelter!
I packed up and headed to Yonkers to begin my journey on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, 1986. When I arrived, I had the good fortune to be included in the work of the New York State Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Eventually, I joined the board of directors serving both as vice president and chair of the legislative committee.
Just prior to my arrival, Governor Mario Cuomo had held a public hearing at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility where a dozen brave, incarcerated women shared their experiences of family violence, how it had impacted them over their lifetime, and how it had contributed to the crime for which they were incarcerated. The voices of these women sent ripples throughout the country, and their stories directly informed the next steps of our response to domestic violence. Under the leadership of Superintendent Elaine Lord, Bedford created the very first family violence program inside a prison. I worked closely with this program and am guided to this day by what I learned from the women there.
Over the last thirty-five years much more has happened, far more than I can enumerate here. The legal and social service landscape has changed immeasurably. We have courts that focus specifically on family violence cases with a one family, one judge approach; we have an array of legal and social services; we have a robust body of law and policy that once simply did not exist. (For a more detailed history, I encourage you to read the first two chapters of the Lawyer’s Manual on Domestic Violence.)
And yet, many of the same problems remain. Sexism, both implicit and explicit, continues to hold women back. Women still report not being believed when they report abuse and continue to be blamed for the abuse they are reporting. There continues to be a tremendous lack of resources, including affordable childcare and housing, adequate public assistance, available living wage employment, and accessible supervised visitation, which prevent women from effectively separating from the person abusing them. The newly enacted law in Texas banning abortion at six-weeks which the US Supreme Court failed to address will effectively gut Roe v. Wade, curtailing a woman’s right to make medical decisions about her body without risking a slew of bounty hunters descending upon her and anyone who supported her. This will harmfully impact battered women, victims of rape and incest, poor women, and those who serve or care for them.
The “movement” has lost its connection to its roots. Its focus on social change to end sexism and its understanding of the interconnection between sexism and other forms of oppression has been lost. Too often there seems to be amnesia about the experience of those who have gone before, the work that was done, and what that work forged. The “movement” has become a “profession” within an industry that purports to respond to domestic and sexual violence with brand new interventions that bear a great resemblance to measures which long ago were tried and failed. Unfortunately, the focus, or in psychological terms, the locus of control, has shifted back to “treating” individuals rather than changing societal values that underpin and give implicit permission to such behavior.
What appears as more recent work on human trafficking, particularly sex trafficking, began in the 1980s as part of the movement to end violence against women. As a result, it is more broadly recognized today, and the greater community better understands the significant overlap with domestic violence.
The pandemic which began in early 2020 has caused many of the social safety nets to thin or evaporate. It has setback the efforts for women’s equality generally and made it even more difficult for women to live independently. Covid has had a disproportionate impact on victims of domestic violence, re-imposing far more limitations on access to resources while simultaneously affording greater surveillance options to the person who is controlling or abusing them. Courts and first responders have struggled to keep up and adapt to continue their basic operations.
And so… this September, I turned 68.
I’ve thought of my life as an adaptation of a Robert Frost poem…
Two roads diverged into a wood.
And I, I took the one that wasn’t there.
And, that has made all the difference.
Looking back, I’ve learned a lot of lessons. Here are just a few.
– In a garden, plants only grow in favorable soil. Pulling individual weeds alone will not change the growing conditions. You must add material to change the soil to achieve the pH necessary for what you want to thrive. The laws of nature apply to creating social change.
– Take an aim far beyond the low hanging fruit. Envision the path to reach the goal. Never make the work about yourself. Be brave. It’s okay if your heart races and your hands sweat along the way. End each day asking yourself if you would feel proud to report your work to victims and survivors. If the reply is not a resounding “yes,” commit to beginning the next day with the resolve necessary to correct your course.
– Resist throwing rocks and making broad proclamations about groups of people or professions, and don’t gossip or backbite. Doing so only closes doors, leaving the problem to be addressed intact, and sometimes solidified. While throwing rocks may feel momentarily gratifying, it palpably impedes change.
– Invite everyone to the table to identify problems and craft solutions. Identify challenges and encourage seeking outside-the-box solutions. Understand and respect the roles of the players necessary for change and how they can contribute and how they may be limited. Find the third way.
– Training is different than education. Training without policy is like pissing in the wind. First, create policy, then train to implement the policy. If the policy is inadequate, work with all sides to improve it. When necessary, use the chain of command within an institution to address recalcitrant individuals.
– Don’t overthink. Creating more and more boxes doesn’t change the pH of the soil. Focus on addressing oppression at its core, e. g., sexism is racism on the level of gender while racism is sexism on the level of color. They grow from the same seed. In the end, we’re working to change the hierarchical pyramid structure of society to a natural circular form where everything is interrelated and interdependent.
Finally, tilt your lamp to light another, but never put down your torch.
Charlotte A. Watson serves as executive director of the New York State Judicial Committee on Women in the Courts and as a member of the Crime Victims Legal Network Advisory Committee. She previously served as executive director of the New York State Office for the Prevention of Domestic Violence, co-chair of the Downstate Coalition for Crime Victims, vice-president and legislative committee chair for the New York State Coalition Against Domestic Violence, president of the Grayson County (TX) Women’s Crisis Center and has led numerous committees and coalitions to address violence against women.