#CENSUS GETS CAUTIOUS THUMBSUP HOW TO#
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By the end of the decade, many groups took on the work of the battered womenвЂ™s movement.ДЄs a result of widespread feminist agitation, understandings and responses to battered women rapidly changed. A massive outpouring of feminist activism and service provision for battered women in the mid-1970s quickly caught the attention of government officials, law enforcement, social workers, and other non-explicitly feminist professionals. The battered womenвЂ™s movement, as it was called, exposed the failures of the law, medicine, and society at large in responding to the 2-4 million women who were beaten in their homes annually.

В©Ellen Shub 2015 all other rights reserved Women rally in City Hall Plaza, in Boston to speak out against violence against women, August 26, 1976 Organizing under the banner of вЂњwe will not be beaten,вЂќ grassroots feminist activists and formerly battered women launched a nationwide campaign in the mid-1970s to expose domestic violence against women, provide shelter and support, and demand radical change from law, medicine, and society. This shift was the direct result of 1970s feminist activism. Over the course of the next decade, the interest in domestic violence would shift from virtual neglect to a significant social concern. In 1973 Los Angeles, for example, homeless shelters provided 1000 beds for men, and only 30 beds for women. Battered women found themselves with little to no social support and no place to go. While there were shelters or temporary housing for those categorized as homeless or displaced, an understanding of вЂњabused womanвЂќ as a separate category of person who sought shelter or support services did not yet exist. There were few services available for abused women in crisis. вЂњHAVE SOME FUN,вЂќ the copy read in bold letters, вЂњBEAT YOUR WIFE TONIGHT.вЂќ This was reflected in an early 1970s ad for a Michigan bowling alley. Police and medical practitioners alike were reluctant to intervene into вЂњprivate affairs,вЂќ or what was then deemed вЂњmatters between a husband and his wife.вЂќ By all accounts, wife abuse was also an accepted custom and often regarded with humor. magazine, founded in 1971, ran a regular feature вЂњNo CommentвЂќ that encouraged readers to send in sexist advertisements and other media.Д¬ulturally, woman battering was deemed a вЂњprivate matterвЂќ and one not worth intervening into.

#CENSUS GETS CAUTIOUS THUMBSUP HOW TO#

The same researcher commented that the вЂњprevailing attitude in the sixtiesвЂќ was that spouse abuse вЂњwas rare, and when it did occur, was the product of mental illness or a psychological disorder.вЂќ In addition, there were no reliable statistics on the rates of incidence of this understudied problem and no legal or medical protocols for how to effectively respond. During the 1960s, scholars and social service providers were only beginning to recognize child abuse as a major social problem, while the scholarship and literature on wife abuse was, as one researcher later described, вЂњvirtually nonexistent.вЂќ The little scholarship that did exist on violence against wives, mostly found in journals of psychiatry, was overtly hostile, suggesting that women provoked their own abuse. For its first thirty years of publication from 1939 to 1969, for example, The Journal of Marriage and Family did not include вЂњviolenceвЂќ in its index.

Indeed, family violence in general was largely dismissed at this time. Дuring the early 1970s, domestic violence remained largely unrecognized and virtually ignored in the legal, medical, and social spheres.

#CENSUS GETS CAUTIOUS THUMBSUP SERIES#

This post is the first in a series exploring the history of nursing and domestic violence from the guest blogger Catherine Jacquet, and Assistant Professor of History and WomenвЂ™s and Gender Studies at Louisiana State University and guest curator of NLMвЂ™s exhibition Confronting Violence: Improving WomenвЂ™s Lives.

Census gets cautious thumbsup