Great interview with the one & only Erin Pizzey - the founder of the world's first shelters for battered women back in the 1970s - with Dean Esmay from AVFM:
Dean: Good morning Erin, how are you?
Erin: Good morning, It’s very cold.
Dean: It’s very cold is it? Well, it’s early December, I guess it is cold; you’re living in London these days, yes?
Erin: Yes I am.
Dean: So, you have recently, in the last year or so, published a book called “
This Way to the Revolution – a Memoir” from Peter Owen Publishers. What can you tell me about that book, Erin?
Erin: I’ve always tried to tell the truth about the
beginnings. I was one of the first people in England to get involved
with the Women’s Movement and what I saw there, I knew perfectly well
was going to be extremely destructive. And, when I began to stand up at
these great big Collective meetings – and interestingly enough there
were a lot of women from America who came over with initial instruction
to show the British women how to be radical feminists. They’re a pretty
frightening crowd and I got screamed at a lot partly because I said many
women like myself, who are married, with or without children are
perfectly happy to have the choice to be able to stay home. So, in the
end last year actually… it took me ten years to get this book published,
it was turned down by every major publisher in this country. And,
finally, Peter Owen, who is a fine very small publishing company, agreed
that they would publish. And they’ve done a wonderful job of it. And it
is, it’s the whole truth about what went on behind the movement… the
feminist movement.
I’m sorry, were you saying something?
Dean: So you say the feminist movement, the women’s
movement… I confess I haven’t read the entire book yet, but I’ve at
least read part of it and it’s certainly very interesting. Would you say
that you considered yourself a feminist in the very early days?
Erin: I considered myself like many women across the
world, I considered myself an equity feminist. I believed in equality
for everyone. Now there were issues that needed discussing, but as soon
as I saw, because you have to remember my background, my parents were
caught by the Communists when I was nine and I didn’t see them for three
years – they were under house arrest…
Dean: Your parents were caught by the Communists?
Erin: Yes in 1949, my father was in Tientsin in the Foreign Office…
Dean: In China?
Erin: Yes, China and they had marched up the
driveway and they were arrested. They were very lucky, my parents,
because they were just under house arrest. Most of the others were put
into prisons. And I had one very close family member who came out
completely insane from what happened to him. So, I had no love of
Communism from the very beginning. From what I saw when I was in these
great big collectives was really Marxism. We were all organized into
groups in our own homes and told that we must have consciousness-raising
sessions. And I remember the woman who came to our
consciousness-raising and when she finished, I said this has nothing to
do with women, this is actually Marxist. I said so we’re supposed to go
to work full time and put our children into care provided by the state –
like the Communist government – and why are we calling this liberation?
And so very quickly I was booted out and went off to open a community
center for mothers and children. And then I knew, once the donations
came in, once the press picked it up–because the local paper–because my
refuge by that point was full—I knew very well the sound of the feminist
boots coming down to actually hijack the entire domestic violence
industry and turn it into a billion dollar industry. Which they’ve done.
Dean: Well those are very powerful words and statements. I understand you were born in China, yes?
Erin: Yes.
Dean: So you and your family were there when they turned communist.
Erin: No, I was born in China, but then my parents
were re-posted to China when I was about eleven years old. They were
reposted to Tientsin and that’s where they were incarcerated.
Dean: Oh I see. Yet, I can already hear some people
objecting. I’ve met a lot of women who consider themselves feminists in
some form or other and they look at you like you’re from Mars if you say
this business about it being Marxist in origin or…
Erin: Yes, but most of them don’t even know anything
about the beginning of this movement. And the thing I have to point
out, very simply, the beginnings of the women’s movement happened way
back when a lot of women were fighting for the rights of people, of
Americans, to end the apartheid that was going on at that time. When
they had finished marching for the civil rights movement—There’s a whole
storied history that you can read it. They came back and decided that
the leftist women wanted their own movement. So instead of it being
Capitalism, which everyone was against in the left wing movements, they
simply changed the goal posts and said it was Patriarchy. Everything was
because of men, because of the power that men have over women. And then
the second part of their argument was that all women are victims of
men’s violence because it’s The Patriarchy. And that is such a lot of
rubbish. Because, we know, and everybody in the business knows, that
both men and women in interpersonal relationships can be violent. And
that’s in every single study all across the Western world. All this time
– 40 years – we’ve been living a big lie led by these Feminist women
who essentially have created a huge billion dollar industry all across
the world and they have shut the doors on men. No men can work in
refuges; no men can sit on Boards; boys under the age of twelve often
can’t go into the refuges. A mother has to make a difficult choice of
what she should do.
Dean: Here in the U.S. I’ve at least come across a few shelters which employ men in some fashion…to act as guards at the doors or…
Erin: That’s not working in refuges; that’s standing outside.
Dean: Standing outside or picking women up and driving them places…yes.
Erin: Not as staff though; not working in the
refuge. In my refuge, half the staff are always men because they’re so
important for children who haven’t known good, kind men…and some of
their mothers.
Dean: I understand. That makes good sense. I see
from your memoir for example, that in the early 60’s you had to show
proof that you intended to get married just to get contraception from
your doctor.
Erin: Yes.
Dean: Women couldn’t apply for mortgages… and so I
presume it’s that sort of thing that made you interested in the Women’s
movement in the first place.
Erin: Yes, absolutely. And I had such a vision, and
partly the refuge because–I know all about violence. Both my parents
were violent. My mother was particularly violent to me because I looked
like my father. And the other two; my twin sister and my brother were
much more like her. And my whole concern is, it is generational
violence, and if we don’t save this generation of children we simply
have more and more violent people. Because, until we understand we
cannot blame men for everything. Women have to look at themselves and be
honest about their own violence. And also, to understand what you do to
a child’s brain when you actually fight each other, scream, yell and
hit children, it causes brain damage. And we know that now from MRI
scans. They can see what it does, particularly to the frontal lobe, the
right frontal lobe, which is the seat of all our emotions.
Dean: There was a psychologist in Canada who
recently published a piece asserting that the stereotype that we seem to
all accept now of the helpless, innocent woman who is beaten on by a
brutish, thuggish man and needs to run away represents perhaps only 4 or
5 percent of all domestic violence cases and that almost all other
cases are more complicated than that. Would you agree that that sounds
about reasonable?
Erin: Yes, of the first hundred women who came into
my refuge, sixty percent were as violent as the men they left. Or, they
were violent and the men weren’t.
Dean: They were violent and the men weren’t?
Erin: Yeah! And that’s why I tried to open a house
for men almost immediately after I opened the refuge for women and my
problem was – and this was a great shock to me – I was given a house at a
Peppercorn Rent
by the Council; and then I asked men who had actually given money for
my refuge for women and children (they were millionaires) to give me
some money for the men’s house, and none of them would give a penny!
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