Erin Pizzey's work with Refuges

[ParsleyTheLioness]

Talking about this on the Relationships board. Does anyone remember this woman from the 60's/70's who set up an early(?) refuge? Are her work and writings still valid today, or discredited at all, anyone have any knowledge? I may not be spelling correctly.

Blimey, I didn't realise she was such a rotter! I was 17 at the time the Chiswick refuge was set up and thought she was wonderful; I never knew all the other stuff about her, and her strange way of looking at things. That'll teach me to do more research!

Well, as Doomcats said above, it sounds as if there are issues within her own personal life that may have led her to the particular actions and views that she chose. However, that is no excuse for the way she has chosen to push those views and block the efforts of others to help abused women and children stay safe and get their lives back together. Understanding isn't the same as excusing.

Ah Spare Rib. I think it folded nearly 20 years ago. Sadly Everywoman Magazine followed it into oblivion soon after (more or less following implosion of the collective.) There's been a sad, sad gap in accessible feminist publications until now when thankfully, there are lots of interesting e-magazines and blogs.

The Wikipedia page would seem to be abit biased and pro-Erin then.

It's quite likely that she wrote the content of the Wiki page herself. Most folks do that!

She also has a gang of MRAs who support her.

Quite a lot of people who become very public 'faces' of activist movements turn out to have serious feet of clay, because to be that driven in the first place you're generally a bit fucked up. I think Pizzey did do some good work and contributed to some good work being done but also has said and done some stupid and harmful things.

That sounds a fair assessment SGB

About Erin

My favourite bit:

[Reporter]: So women are as violent as men?

[Pizzey] "Well, we tend to implode, our violence is turned in on ourselves or is covert - men explode and hurt others."

[Reporter]: So it's not exactly the same?

"It's violence," Pizzey says stubbornly

it takes a special type of stubborn contrariness, to insist that there's no difference between self-harming and hurting someone else. talk about wilful refusal to engage with common sense

She's also pretty unique amongst well known feminists who address male violence against women to take such an unwavering victim blaming line. In fact I think she's on her own with that one.

Thought I might add a little balance to this interestingly one sided discussion. This article was written by a feminist, so you're safe to look at it.

www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,197550,00.html

www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,197550,00.html

It's so irritating when anti-feminists call themselves feminists. It's dishonest too.

Interesting comment Nyac. How can you tell which feminists are anti-feminists?
Are they the ones that don't quite follow your opinions?

They're the ones that promote anti-feminism. Wendy McElroy and Christina Hoff Summers (who is the other one who pops up in these sorts of discussions) are paid to preach anti-feminism as feminism. It's not a secret.

Why do you think that Wendy McElroy is a feminist?

Sigmund, are you Erin Pizzey ?

I claim my five pounds

Wendy McElroy founded iFeminism, which apparently is a "new" form of feminism, a feminism of individualism. In other words it undermines the fundamental basis of feminism which is the analysis that women are oppressed and mistreated as a group or a class.

That's not feminism, that's just stealing its name to further the interests of anti-feminism.

I think Wendy McElroy is a feminist because I believe it, therefore it is true. You should have some understanding of that statement, no?

the word 'shrill' in the penultimate paragraph helps too.

I'm not Erin Pizzy and you're no Marjorie Proops.

lol at needing to balance all this horrid feminism with a good bit of misogyny

I think I just explained myself.

Do you want to explain your position SF.

I think Sigmund is working to live up to their name, Basil.

anti feminists just cant resist this place, can they?

I'm the first to admit that feminism can be as doctrinaire, sectarian and intolerant as any other political movement. I was an 80s activist and I have the scars on my back to prove it. At times it was horrendous, though no more horrendous than what was going on in, say, the Labour Party in Liverpool. I really hope that the current wave of young feminists will do things differently, because frankly back then we tore ourselves apart.

But. Erin Pizzey is not an antidote to the errors of those times. She is a product of them. She is a controversialist, a look-at-me-standing-against-the-tide grandstander. it was almost inevitable that she would pit herself against the prevailing orthodoxies within feminism. So often, the women who have the kind of pig-headed vision and thick skin to start something extraordinary against the odds are really difficult characters. You have to admire them, but preferably from afar. I could reel off the names of a dozen feminist heroines right now who have been an absolute nightmare for the people who have to work with and for them.

Erin Pizzey didn't just present a more nuanced, complex view of domestic violence. (Most of us are quite capable of acknowledging that women can be abusive, thanks Fox News.) She absolutely fed off the controversy and ratcheted up her response to it, coming out with wave after wave of incendiary and offensive stuff designed to wind up the fembots. More shame her and, in my view, more shame to those who allowed themselves to be wound up. None of it was edifying but Pizzey fed the dynamic as much as those idiots who threatened her.