WHO’S FAILING THE FAMILY

BY ERIN PIZZEY

I greatly hoped, when the women’s movement first began to form in England in the late sixties and early seventies, that married woman like myself, at home bringing up our children, would no longer be isolated. I strongly believed that the family was the cornerstone of any civilisation. I was born in China and most of my formative years were spent in the Middle East. When I married and returned to England, I hadn’t realised, that in our Western world, the role of motherhood left those of us who chose to be at home, virtual outcasts. I imagined that this new women’s liberation movement, would devise strategies where all women from every walk of life could meet together to work for equality for women in the work place, in education and more importantly to raise the consciousness of the government and the nation to the vital work done my by mothers in the home.


In 1971, I flocked with my friends to the first feminist collectives held in London and other major cities of the country to listen to the prophets of the new revolution. Most of us were appalled at what we heard and intimidated by the rage and fury of the visionaries who claimed that they were speaking on behalf of ‘all women.’ I did not want to join a movement that preached hatred of family life and of men. Many of the women in those early days of the women’s liberation movement, defected back to their homes and to their husbands.

My vision for the future for women who chose marriage and family life was too fierce to turn my back on the thousands of women in this country, who also believed that we needed to redefine women’s role in the community. I stayed to argue with the leading proponents of the movement. I pointed out that I considered it a luxury to have a husband who paid the mortgage so that I could be at home with our children. Like so many women I had been forced to go out to work in order help pay the bills. I had to leave my little daughter with a child minder and I suffered like so many women do, from the guilt and the exhaustion of too many demands upon me and not enough time. I refused, I said, to see the family as a ‘place of oppression’ and to define my husband as ‘my jailer.’

Finally, those of us who opposed the Marxist Feminist leadership, were driven out of the movement. We objected to the violence taking place in England at that time. We did not see the invasion of the Miss World contest in 1970, by the women’s movement as a blow for women’s liberation, nor did we applaud the bombing of the BBC van outside the contest later that night (various anarchist groups were implicated). When in 1972 the Kensington boutique ‘Biba’ was also bombed, I realised that there was no place for me any longer amongst these violent and disastrous movements. What I did feel, listening and working in the women’s liberation offices in Little Newport Street, in London, was that many of the leading lights in this movement, while chanting their slogan, ‘the personal is political,’ were in denial of their own violent and abused childhoods. I saw them as ‘wounded warriors,’ unable to take responsibility for themselves and their damage, they projected their rage and their discontent, onto ‘all men.’

The fact that I was driven out of the movement only gave me the impetus to move on and to find a small house in Hounslow which I was given at a peppercorn rent. Here, with our children, we could meet and use our many and varied talents to work within our communities. Very soon the first ‘battered women,’ arrived and asked for refuge. Then, for me, the nightmare began. I realised as the women poured through the door with their children, that it would not be long before the women’s movement would also put on an appearance. I still had contacts within the movement. They reported that the movement no longer had any popular support from women across the country and that they also had no more funding.

By this time, I was very aware that while many of the women were indeed ‘innocent victims of their partner’s violence,’ many were not. Of the first hundred women that came into my refuge, sixty two were as violent as the men they left. They were not ‘victims of their partner’s violence.’ They were ‘victims of their own violence.’ Most of these women had experienced sexual abuse and violence in their own childhoods. Not only were they violent in the refuge but they were also violent and abusive to their children. They were the women most likely to go back to their violent partners or if they left, to go on to form another violent relationship. These were the women who most need our love and concern. I also saw all the men who came looking for their partners and their children. I could see quite plainly that domestic violence was not a gender issue. Both men and women could be equally violent. What I had to say was suppressed. Feminist journalists and radical feminist editors in publishing houses controlled the flow of information to the public. By now the feminist movement had a strangle hold on the subject of domestic violence. They had found a cause to further their political vision of a world without the family and without men. They also had the access to money. The abuse industry was born.

Because of my opposition to the hijacking of the refuge movement, I was a target for abuse. Anywhere I spoke there was a contingent of screaming, heckling feminists waiting for me. Hounslow Council decided to proceed against me in court and I was packed to go to prison for most of the twelve years that I ran my refuge. Abusive telephone calls to my home, death threats and bomb scares, became a way of living for me and for my family. Finally, the bomb squad, asked me to have all my mail delivered to their head quarters. The final outrage occurred when I was asked to travel to Aberdeen University to stand as a candidate for the post of Rector for the University in 1981. I was hopeful that I could have an influence on the young students at the university. At the polling booths Scottish Women’s Aid made it their business to hand out leaflets claiming that I believed that women ‘invited violence,’ and ‘provoked male violence,’ this was the gist of their message.

Exhausted and disillusioned at the growing hostility towards men in the Courts and the lack of support for family life from the government, I went reluctantly into exile with my children and grandchildren. My plan was to go to Santa Fe, New Mexico to write novels. I thought then that I could reach the people who read my non-fiction in my novels. Very soon I was running another refuge nearby and working against sexual abusers and paedolphiles. I found to my cost that Santa Fe was sufficiently lawless to attract these dangerous people. When I returned to England for the publication of my book ‘PRONE TO VIOLENCE,’ I was met with a solid wall of feminist demonstrators. ‘ALL MEN ARE RAPISTS,’ ‘ALL MEN ARE BATTERERS,’ read the placards. The police insisted that I have an escort all round England for my book tour. By then I knew that my position in America could not be permanent. The women’ movement there was even stronger and their strangle hold over the refuges( called shelters) and access to government and state resources was almost absolute. Although I was invited to lecture, every time I did the gender feminists were waiting to invade my workshops and to heckle my speeches. The threats and the persecution began again. Finally, one of my dogs was shot on Christmas day on my property, and I knew the time had come to leave.

In 1997, I was back in England again. I was homeless and penniless when a producer telephoned from the BBC and asked if I would do a programme with him for a BBC2 Community Programme Unit. The film was called ‘The Day That Changed My Life.’ Oddly enough my refuge was one of the first of the BBC2 Community programme unit ever produced. I had good memories of the integrity of the programmes they made in those days and I agreed. The producer visited me in my homeless family hostel in Richmond and then decided that I should make the documentary for another series also run by his department called ‘Counterblast.’ I was extremely doubtful that the programme would ever be aired. But the producer persisted and finally, ‘Who’s Failing The Family,’ will go out on BBC2 on Tuesday at 7.30 p.m. As a result of working on this film, I no longer feel so alone in this battle to save the traditional family. The people who have come to take part in the film are only a tip of the iceberg of concerned people in the rest of this country. Many others working in the field of domestic violence assured me that if they took part in the film, they would be personally, threatened and intimidated. A few, said they feared that their research grants would be withdrawn. Others were afraid of loosing their jobs. I know these people are not paranoid, I have personal experience of the brooding evil of the gender feminists who are in positions of power in our society. When I am asked if I am afraid to continue to fight, I can only reply, ‘tis a mighty God I serve, of whom shall I be afraid?’