Men's Rights Agency - Domestic
Violence
Erin Pizzey dared to say publicly that women can be as violent
as men....28/2/98
JUST recently a 'battered' woman (for that is how she saw herself) came to me for help. Her lover, who lived apart from her and her children, had beaten her up badly and she was forced to go to hospital.
He then took her back to her own house and stayed with her in order to look after her while her wounds healed.
'You are not a battered woman,' I said with a sigh. I define a battered woman as a woman who is a genuine victim of her partner's violence. 'You are a violence-prone woman, a victim of your own need for violence.'
I DARED TO SAY PUBLICLY THAT WOMEN CAN BE AS VIOLENT
AS MEN AND THAT WOMEN WERE A GREAT DEAL MORE PSYCHOLOGICALLY VIOLENT THAN
MEN
I sighed because those two sentences uttered twenty-five years ago in my
early work at Chiswick caused me to be hated and despised. I became the nation's
conscience. I dared to say publicly that women can be as violent as men and
that women were a great deal more psychologically violent than men.
In this woman's case we have a great deal of work to do and she needs to
find herself a good therapist.
In 1971, inspired by the promise of women journalists and other media
manipulators, I decided to join the newly founded Women's Movement.
'Sisterhood is powerful,' they chanted. 'Sisters unite, no more competing,
women helping women.' It all sounded too good to be true.
My first meeting filled me with doubts. It was held in a very middle-class
home in Chiswick and I gazed at the Mao posters on the wall of the drawing-room.
When asked by the hostess why I was there, I replied that my husband was
a television reporter and was very rarely home so that I felt lonely and
isolated with my two children.
'Your problem is not your isolation but your husband. He oppresses you and
he is a capitalist.' I pointed out that she too had a mortgage so she therefore
was a capitalist, and, far from oppressing me, my husband was baby-sitting
so that I could attend the meeting. Her husband was out at a union meeting
organising the Brentford Biscuit Factory with the help of his degree in political
science, to prepare for the forthcoming revolution.
THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT WAS DOMINATED BY THE RADICAL
SEPARATIST MOVEMENT. THEY NOT ONLY HATED MEN BUT HETEROSEXUAL WOMEN AS
WELL
What the woman didn't know was that I was the daughter of a diplomat. I was
born in China and travelled the world with my father. I also worked in the
Foreign Office and was well aware of the atrocities both in Russia and in
China.
Then, over cups of tea, we were assured that women were a minority group.
I pointed out that women made up 52% of the world's population. I was given
Mao's little red book and Shrew magazine. I took it home and was horrified
at the hatred it spewed against men.
I decided that this organisation needed looking at. With both children in
school and time on my hands I went to work for the Women's Liberation workshop
in Shaftesbury Avenue. I witnessed the women working there tearing open letters
and pocketing the three pounds ten shillings that desperate women were sending
to join the movement. I tried to answer as many of the letters as I could.
Some of that money went into buying explosives! Terrorists
in the Women's Movement blew up the BBC van outside the Miss World Contest
and the top off the Post Office Tower. I called in the police.
All this rubbish and rhetoric was to culminate in the uprising of the 'working
classes', the death of Capitalism and the destruction of all men.
Needless to say there were virtually no working class women in this movement.
Most of the revolution was fought around middle class dinner tables in grisly
Islington.
By now I was very firmly 'the enemy'. Men, at this point, took the whole
movement as a joke, but it was no joke, as many homeless men deprived of
their children will tell you. Savaged by feminist lawyers and therapists,
men have routinely been deprived of their homes, their children and their
incomes. I knew that I wanted to fulfil my original dream: women working
with women in co-operation with men. The idea that we should work with men
was anathema to these women. The Women's Movement was dominated by the Radical
Separatist Movement. They not only hated men but heterosexual women as well.
I saw through their very hidden agenda. I stood on platforms saying that
if I had to pay three pounds ten shillings, meet in cells and call my friends
coAustralian Men's Rights Asscoationde, then they were asking me to join the Communist Party, which was
fine, but don't lie. Don't collect money under false pretenses. I had plenty
of good Communist friends; I wanted a movement that truly represented women,
not tired, hacked-to-death male politics.
The early collective meetings and conferences involved hundreds of women,
mostly middle-class women bored with their lifestyles. They were terrifying.
Anyone brought up in a girl's boarding school as I was, knows how violent
and manipulative women can be. The bullying in the collectives was unabated.
No lipstick, no high heels, no deodorant. I broke all the rules. 'Why do
you wear men's suits and ties' I asked, 'if you so hate men?' Silly question,
I suppose. 'We are wearing the symbol of our oppression,' was the humourless
reply.
By now I realised through reading the Women's Movement literature that those
thousands of women working in all caring fields, the journalists, the television
makers, were determined to destroy family life in England. 'Make the personal
political,' was one of their many banners.
So thousands of violent and very disturbed women attacked normal happily
married women and our traditional way of life. Secret meetings were held
(everything was done in secret) and I received a letter: '... and the collective
decided that until the whole matter is sorted out, and you have given a statement
of this position to a woman lawyer, or someone in the NCCL, you should no
longer work in the office or attend meetings of any of the collectives.'
Profoundly depressed by my experiences in the movement, I went off to do
what I always believed would liberate women: a place to gather and to work
together in co-operation with men.
Soon, beaten and battered women with their children were coming to me for
help. There was no literature on battered women, so I wrote Scream Quietly
or the Neighbours will Hear. I was immediately in trouble because the book
was not 'politically correct'. It discussed family violence and I refused
to let the Managing Director politicise my book.
By now I was giving out the information that 62
women out of the first hundred women who came to the refuge were as violent
or more violent than the men they left. Also, many were prostitutes taking
refuge from their violent pimps.
This infuriated the Women's Movement. I knew that as soon as I attracted
publicity and funding, the Women's Movement which by now attracted neither,
would be beating on my door.
When I called a conference to help other groups to get started, several hundred
women with feminists and radical separatist feminists invaded my conference.
They started their usual bogus rubbish trying to appeal to my mothers, making
much use of the phrase 'working classes'. My mothers were not impressed.
One of my closes friends at Chiswick said, 'There isn't a working class woman
amongst you.' Another, slightly bolder, yelled 'Go home and get your dildoes!'
'How will you pay for your refuge?' she sniffed.
'I shall pray,' I said. I did all the time and it was our prayers that sustained
Chiswick for all those years. The federation used all their contacts in the
media (many of them were journalists) to rubbish me and my work.
By now I was writing at home at night. They came to interview me about my
books but the books were never discussed, only how fat or belligerent I was.
I had recently asked the Home Office for their latest report and I was not
surprised to see that my name and Scream Quietly, the first book in the world
on wife battering, were missing. I knew from other writers that editors in
the publishing world of London were themselves radical feminists and it was
their habit to dictate their themes to desperate writers, who were then coerced
into writing the editor's book, knowing that, should they disobey, they would
not be published. My brother, Danny, always wrote what he was told to write.
He complained down the telephone to me and finally, just before he died,
he said bitterly, 'I have no contracts and no firm deals in sight.' He rewrote
the four hundred page synopsis for his book four times to suit his agent
and his publishers.
Throughout all the fighting I kept preaching that family life was, and always
will be, the foundation of any civilization. Destroy the family and you destroy
the country.
I warned that of the violent women with their children coming to me,virtually
none used contraception. My mothers had an average of 5.1children, meanwhile
non-violent families had an average of 2.5.
I wrote reports, I drafted memos, all to no avail. Nobody wanted to hear
what I had to say. In the back of Scream Quietly I listed all the agencies
that had failed my families. I wrote that I was
not seeing social workers, I was seeing political activists with social work
degrees.
The same went for teachers and probation officers, editors of books and
magazines. Like a giant cancer, this movement dug its crabs' legs into anywhere
they could wield their power.
Many women, assisted by weak men, sought to destroy me and my work and, finally
having fought court cases that involved disobeying judges' orders in order
to save children's lives, I knew I would be ousted from my own refuge. A
few men, realising the dangers, bravely tried to make their voices heard.
They, too, were excoriated by both men and women.
Businessmen in the media, managing directors of publishing houses, never
understood that their editors were lying to them, playing the numbers game.
'Who do you think you are?' screamed one feminist editor.
'I must be somebody,' I replied. 'After all, I'm in Debrett's and Who's Who.
You're nobody in publishing.'
Another said, 'Why can't you write the sort of book you know I like, Erin
. . . books about women loving women?'
'I can't,' I replied. 'I'm a heterosexual writer and all my books celebrate
family life.'
Because men looked upon the refuge movement as a 'woman's issue',newspapers
sent women journalists to attack me. I addressed a conference of radical
feminists and asked them why, when I respected their right to practise their
politics and define their own sexuality, they denied me my rights to my
heterosexuality, my right to live and work to preserve family life and to
enjoy being at home with my family. I told them that I think being a mother
and a grandmother has given me more joy than any other achievement. I was
screamed down and met with utter hostility.
When I published Prone to Violence, a book about my work with violent women
and the children in the refuge, I was picketed by hundreds of banner-waving
women.
'All men are bastards!' read some of the banners. 'All men are rapists!'
shrieked another. 'If those banners said Jews or black people, you would
have arrested those women,' I told a policeman who had come to say that I
had to have a police escort all around England for the book tour.
In due course, I lost the refuge but a carefully orchestrated campaign in
the press never allowed the people of England to know that I was pushed into
exile. The newspapers made much of my defection and I was helpless. My crime
was to fight for family life and values.
A few months ago The Sunday Times sent a reporter to find out why I was
waitressing in a bar in exchange for food. 'There seems to have been a
conspiracy,' the reporter wrote. I knew that 'remainder' notices would soon
be forthcoming and now my backlist is 'remaindered'. Thank goodness my books
are selling all over the world including sales in Russia. I own nothing but
my four dogs and my cat and I work internationally for peace in the family.
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[Note: Prone to Violence 1982 Hamlyn Paperbacks, Middlesex (England) is not
an easy book to find. Why not request it in your library?]
NEWS FLASH! Prone to Violence is now available on the
Internet.http://www.acfc.org
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