My quarrel with the movement was that from the very beginning a hard core of middle aged Marxist women, many of whom were deeply embedded into the education system, Universities, Civil Service and the media were lying to women everywhere.
They were not concerned with the day to day life of women at home with their children. Their main ambition was to re-educate women into believing that the family was a dangerous place for women and children and that in this new dawn the family would be defined as women with their children and men’s roles as protectors and providers would be dispensed with. The bait was that feminism was about seeking equality with men and most women and some men were fooled.
My father, mother and brother were captured by the Communists in Tien Sien in 1948 they were held under house arrest for the next three years. I was well aware of the Communist movement that was now sweeping across the Western world funded largely with Russian money and ideological brain washing from Maoists. In the sixties left wing intellectuals were out in force defending the atrocities perpetrated by Mao in China and Stalin in Russia. In the huge collectives we were advised that we should form ourselves into groups across the country, meet in each other’s houses, and ‘raise our consciousness.’ Each group was visited by a ‘comrade’ who told us that our source of discomfort was the fact that we were ‘oppressed’ by our partners and that as we continued to work and understand our oppression we would as a body throw off our chains, throw out the fathers of our children and ‘liberate’ ourselves.
In 1971 liberals, the media, universities and an ill-assorted band of left wing journalists were all leaping to the barricades to fight in the coming revolution against capitalism. What the men had not understood was that their female partners were now dissenting from fighting side by side with their brothers but and were actively rearranging the goal posts. No longer as far as the new feminists were concerned was capitalism the enemy but it was replaced by ‘patriarchy.’
Their battle cry was that men had from time immemorial abused and oppressed women, and this new emerging movement would release all women from marriage and servitude. In its place the women’s revolution would deliver a life free from male domination and servitude. The feminist movement would ensure twenty-four hour nurseries and women, who could now file for a ‘no fault divorce,’ could look forward to staying in the matrimonial home funded by their partners. A woman now could go out to work and compete with men.
As our tiny refuge in Belmont Terrace continued to take in desperate women and children it was beginning to come to the attention of the local newspapers. My main concern was that the reporting in the media of the antics of the feminist movement were fading away. I was also aware as that while the public began to read about the struggle we had to keep the door open in the refuge, it meant that we were receiving money almost daily in the post. Our safety lay in the total support that we had across the country, and Hounslow were forced to stay their hand from shutting us down.
I was very aware that, of the first hundred women who came into the refuge, 62 of them were more violent than the men they left. I knew the entire histories of the families that came into my care. I also saw any of the men who wanted my help and I tried to open a men’s refuge because I recognised that the roots of domestic violence lay in intergenerational family violence. My concern was to create a therapeutic community to help my violence prone women and their children who needed time to learn different strategies for survival other than violence. Women who were innocent victims of their partner’s violence didn’t need therapy but they did need a safe place to stay with their children until they could move on into the community.
In 1974 we decided to hold a small conference in our church hall to invite emerging groups who were trying to open refuges in their own areas. We were all unaware that radical feminists were now opening refuges as they realised that their funding was now dwindling away as normal women left the movement in disgust. Not only would they be funded but they could use the refuges (shelters in America) to brainwash women into believing that ‘all women were victims of male violence.’ At our pathetic little conference in the church hall women started to pour in and we sat bewildered. It became very obvious that there had been several meetings before any of these groups of women came to join us.
‘In 1974, twenty-seven groups from as far afield as Dublin and the north of Scotland gathered at a national conference organized by Chiswick Women’s Aid………
She (Pizzey) saw wife-battering essentially as a psychological problem and claimed that certain kinds of women were ‘violence prone’ and invited assault. To feminists this was dangerous nonsense: they saw domestic violence as an expression of the power that men wielded over women, in a society where female dependence was built into the structure of everyday life. From their own extensive experience of working in refuges they concluded that wife-battering was not the practice of a deviant few, but something which could emerge in the ‘normal’ course of marital relations.’ [Excerpt from Sweet Freedom, published by Blackwell in 1987 ISBN 0-631-14957-0.’ The authors Anna Coot and Beatrix Campbell activists in the feminist movement].I went home devastated that what I had dreaded ever since I opened my refuge had happened. These women had no interest in the fate of very desperate women and children, still less would they ever consider men as victims. From that conference the militant groups quickly formed themselves in the Women’s Aid Federation and documented their explicit feminist objectives. No men could work in the refuges, no boys over twelve could come in with their families – the mothers of teenage boys would have to make other arrangements. The position in 1974 across the western world was that this fast growing political empire could now flourish funded by the refuge/shelters on the backs of women and their children.
With unlimited funding in place other groups who wished to open refuges were not able to affiliate with the National Federation if they did not swear allegiance to the feminist movement. All groups were to pay a yearly fee to the Federation and the Federation was under no obligation to fund refuges, and all monies from tax payers and grants would go to furthering the aims of the feminist revolution everywhere. Conferences were called regularly and the feminists were in a powerful position to promote their ideology to all attendees. Women in academia brainwashed their female students and began courses in ‘women’s studies’ from which men were excluded. Very quickly these Women’s Studies grew, like a malignant cancer, across the academic world and young women were encouraged to see themselves as helpless victims. They were taught to believe that male students could not be trusted to refrain from drugging, raping and abusing female students and before long the university campus became hostile to young men.
The feminist movement also moved into the field of training the Judiciary the police, social workers and all family agencies. Many women were advised by lawyers to obtain a quick divorce by claiming that they were victims of domestic violence. In Canada when a father came home from work and found his house empty of his partner and children it was called ‘hoovering.’ If he called to police to say his family were missing he was not told where they were — all that the police would say that she and the children were safe. If he did not submit to his wife’s demands she could then claim (this is called the ‘silver bullet’) that he had molested his children and he could never see them again.
The courts became uniformly hostile to men and fathers. A punitive programme called the ‘Duluth Model’ was introduced in 2006 it was called a perpetrator’s programme and Judges were advised by family agencies that fathers should complete to programme even if they had been found innocent of all allegations against them made by their partners. There was no therapeutic intent behind this model, its main concern was to shame and bully men desperate to see their children that they had to begin by apologising for their male privileges and they also had to confess that they were guilty of abusing women by virtue of being men. If a man refused he would not be allowed to see his children.
Internationally feminist influences and thought were taken up by women believing that they were supporting a movement that reached out to other women to fight for equality with men. Over the next forty five years women in all walks of life were moving into positions of power and equal opportunities opened up employment choices for all women. Moves were made to insist that there should be quotas for women to shoe-horn them into jobs. Where a man and a woman had equal qualifications the woman must be offered the job.
Women were also moving into powerful positions in the education system and in universities, civil service and international organisation like the United Nations. What no one seemed to notice is that feminists were quietly appointing other feminists to jobs and slowly men were being pushed out of many spheres in the job markets.
A rising number of broken men began to surface on the internet telling of how false accusations meant that they were dragged from their homes by partners who no longer had to offer any evidence to back up their allegations. In Western democracies everyone has the right to be considered innocent until proved guilty. Men lost that right and they were deemed guilty and had to prove their innocence. Men lost their children when vicious women decided that they would abort any attempt to let a father see his children and the courts did nothing about it.
As the years went by the suicide rates for men began to rise and far outstrip the rate for women and nothing was done. I was alone for many years trying to get my voice heard. It was a lonely place to be because it was impossible to get people to understand what I could see was happening. People tended to write me off as paranoid. Nothing I wrote could be published because editors tended to appoint women journalists to interview me with the result that I was silenced. There was an equal censorship in publishing houses. The editors wanted novels about women victims and brutal men.
The feminists running refuges/shelters falsified research figures. Time and time again figures for women who were brutalised were given but no mentioned was made for men who were also victims. Figures for women who were murdered were also given to the press but there was no mention of men dying in the hands of their female partners. None of the feminist research figures stand up to scrutiny. International evidenced-based research has been with us for many years and the results always argued that in intimate partner violence both men and women are equally guilty but this information fell on deaf ears and no government was interested.
No attempt has been made to stem the tide of demonising men and boys. Because the education system has for so long discriminated against boys, and the way that boys learn, we have generations of young men who have been educationally failed by successive governments. A huge number of boys live without fathers and move through the education system without any male role models. Men have been driven out of teaching because of the undercurrent that taints them with suggestions that they may be paedophiles. Gangs have grown out of the fatherless boys looking for male roles and a sense of masculinity. Over two decades men have been made to feel ashamed of being made. Young boys have been marginalised and any masculine behaviour such as rough and tumble play is punished in schools. Men in an effort to be accepted by feminist women have created groups such as ‘white ribbon campaign.’
‘White ribbon is helping create tools, strategies and models that challenge negative, outdated concepts of manhood…’ In other words the white ribbon campaign is seeking to feminise men starting with young boys in schools where they are most vulnerable. Thus from an early age men are now being brainwashed to be ashamed of the normal behaviour and to submit their lives to a feminized version of they are led to think they really ought to be.
Certainly very violent men and women who abuse each other and their children (mothers are far more likely to abuse children than fathers) should be subject to criminal procedures, however the war against men and boys has taken us into an unknown historical journey. Condemnation and shaming of men reached epic proportions and reaction is now forming where many men are refusing to marry and in many cases even to live with women. Looking at this phenomenon dispassionately I have to agree with them. Why would you risk losing your home, your children and your income when your partner knows she can oust you from her life, bar you from your children when your partner can pick up the phone and with no evidence you find yourself guilty of a criminal offence?
Many men live in fear these days. High profile men can be accused (again without any evidence) and publically put on trial by the media by women making allegations that sometimes span forty years. Even if the Crown Prosecution decides not to prosecute after a month of the allegations hanging over the man and his family, they will say that the case won’t go to trial ‘for lack of evidence.’ They do not admit that they yet again have tried to destroy the man and should apologise and declare him to be innocent. The accuser is not held responsible for destroying an innocent man. According to the Crown Prosecution in England ‘All women claiming sexual abuse and rape MUST be believed’ and I believe it to be the rule everywhere else. How can it be that the CPS has the power to take away a man’s right to be innocent until proven guilty?
Some men simply quietly stay away from relationships with women, and some, bitter and burnt, scorch the internet with their anger, others gather under the heading ‘Men going their own way’ a loose organisation of like-minded men. A Voice for Men is an internet platform where men can meet and share their experiences and help and advise each other. Their first international conference was held in Detroit a couple of years ago. They were hounded out of the hotel they had chosen for their conference by local feminists but they went ahead and I attended that conference and was overwhelmed by the men and women I saw gathered together to work towards ending violence towards everyone. Before this can happen we have to move away from the false claim that it is men who are abusers and women victims.
I find it totally condescending that women believe they can tell other women that they are so weak and so helpless that they cannot be trusted to take responsibility for their choices of relationships or their part in the violence. We have established that the roots of violence lie in intergenerational family violence. Now we have to expose the lies and the fraudulent appropriation of tax payer’s money to fund an evil empire.
We need to move swiftly because our children are being harmed in our education system. Our relationships with each other are being destroyed by this monstrous regiment of women. Above all though, in this present climate of all-out war waged against men children, are the main victims. I have always believed that the family is the corner stone of any civilization it is within those kind loving arms of both parents can nurture and grow their children to be warm loving members of our communities. I think in fifty years’ time people will look back in amazement that people were so blinded by feminism that they ignored the Trojan horse in their midst.
Equality for all is a worthy goal but creating a hate movement against half the human race is what has happened. We need to expose feminism for what it is: exploitation of all of us for power and control and funding.
About Erin Pizzey
Erin Pizzey is founder of Chiswick Womens' Aid, the first ever refuge in the world for victims of domestic violence. She is a lecturer and advocate, and has authored books on domestic abuse, including the seminal "Prone to Violence." Her latest effort is her autobiography, titled "This Way to the Revolution." She is also an Editor-at-Large and adviser for A Voice for Men on domestic violence policy.
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