Helen Lewis wrote about Erin Pizzey in her book, Difficult Women and an extract from it is in The Atlantic .
In 1976, a few years after Pizzey founded her refuge, the American feminist Jo Freeman wrote an article in Ms. magazine titled “ Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood. ” It generated an outpouring of letters from other women who felt that they had also been subject to this practice. Trashing, Freeman explained, was not criticism or disagreement, which were a healthy and normal part of any movement. “Trashing is a particularly vicious form of character assassination which amounts to psychological rape,” she wrote. “It is manipulative, dishonest, and excessive. It is occasionally disguised by the rhetoric of honest conflict, or covered up by denying that any disapproval exists at all. But it is not done to expose disagreements or resolve differences. It is done to disparage and destroy.”
Freeman’s and Pizzey’s negative experiences took place in real-world collectives. The online feminism of the 2010s added a new dimension because it was possible to be the target of trashing by several hundred people at once, in real time. Anger is a great engine of change, and activists are often dismissed by those who hold power as “too radical” or “too aggressive” in their demands, but outrage became prized for its own sake, and online feminists lost the ability to distinguish between righteous indignation and mere spite. Worse, self-appointed “allies” went full The Crucible by performatively denouncing their peers.
Being trashed is a traumatic experience. I was accused of endangering lives, because my rhetoric was so hate-filled that people reading it would surely kill themselves. I was a racist. I was a transphobe. I was accused of keeping a blacklist of writers and using my immense power to keep them out of British journalism. I was out of touch because I was middle-aged. (Funny: I was not yet 30.) I had dropped my double-barreled name to hide my aristocratic roots. (Painful: My divorce was still recent.) A caricature developed, a shadow Helen who stalked me around the internet: Absurdly posh, oblivious, ruthlessly careerist, and concerned only with fripperies.
Everything I did just made it worse....The most panic-inducing experiences were the attempts to isolate me: Any contact with me was deemed to make other feminists unclean. My existence itself, and my success, was a provocation. I was taking up a space that another, more worthy woman could have held.
It was, as Freeman wrote, a character assassination.
Lewis: www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/02/feminism-mens-rights-activism-cancel-culture/607057/
Freeman: www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm