This book emerges at the intersection of three paths my life has taken: in literature, in counseling, and in health care. As an adult with a young family, I enrolled at the University of Texas at Dallas where I developed an interest in modern literature, experimental writing and first-person narratives, which soon merged with an awakening passion for feminism and women's studies. After I finished my M. A. I taught English and humanities, wrote essays and book reviews focusing on women's literature, started a novel and a biographical project, but I felt frustrated by a need to work actively in an area concerned with women's issues. To fill that gap in my life, I volunteered in the Battered Woman's Emergency Intervention Project at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. After six months, I was hired as the project coordinator.
My decision to turn my experience at Parkland into a book reflects my commitment to women's issues and literature and brings my life full circle. In my youth, when I went to college the first time around, I became a dental hygienist. Because of my training and practice in this health-care field, I felt comfortable in a hospital setting and in one-on-one dialogues with patients who accessed our service and with clients in the counseling programs and shelters where I conducted workshops on journal writing.
The women who worked as volunteers and the staff who supported our efforts were some of the most courageous and remarkable people I have ever known. Consequently, my activities with the program provided some of the richest and most rewarding experiences in my professional career. Although the program closed because of inadequate funding, this book celebrates the lives that touched mine and ignited the creative spark that resulted in this anthology. The voices of the women who told their stories in the emergency room echo in these pages. As we intervened in their lives, they intervened in ours. Their memory inspires this book.
Although the germination of this anthology centered on battered women and family violence, I enlarged its concept to include contributions that describe the myriad violences affecting women and to explore the idea of a continuum linking categories of public and private crime. Because of my literary background, I recognized a need to record and to preserve these stories for posterity as part of the body of twentieth-century women's literature. Working with abused women through the hospital program, I came to believe that all women are battered by a world that endorses sexism; all women suffer from feelings of marginalization; all women struggle to unlock their silences; all women must fight to reclaim their most precious birthright: Self-Power.
Therefore, I put out a call to professional writers, to women in shelters, and to women in academe; I advertised in literary journals and newsletters as well as those with a social science focus, asking for autobiographical writings by women surviving any kind of violence and abuse. This anthology is the result of that call—and a long process of collecting, selecting, and editing.
These autobiographical narratives and poems relate stories of battering, incest, rape, and imprisonment for murder in self-defense. Contributors range from professionals with advanced degrees to the uneducated, across a wide span of race, class, age, and ethnicity. Recognizing similarities across differences reveals a sense of the universal condition of women's experience, for that which is private and personal speaks most poignantly to others. As Anaďs Nin puts it, "The personal life, deeply lived, takes you beyond the personal" (Hinz 1975, 162).
Working with such intimate details builds deep levels of trust; as a result of consulting on these manuscripts, many of the contributors have become part of my life. Some manuscripts went through lengthy processes of revision, just to break the barriers that silenced the writer even as she struggled to speak. Other manuscripts are published with few revisions. Each woman is represented here by her best effort. Writing is a healing tool. You, the reader, will witness the process of women writing their way from oppression to autonomy in their struggle to transcend the violence in their lives.
Beginnings
In a tiny cubicle in the psychiatry department of the emergency room, a woman lies on the floor on a mat, facing the wall. A flimsy hospital gown is slightly open down her back. She is passive, vulnerable, lethargic. The psychiatry resident on duty called me in to consult because she heard my lecture about battered women and she thinks "this woman may be one." The psychiatrist, who has been trained to lock this "hysterical" woman in a padded cell and leave her there to "dry out," is searching beyond the traditional, institutional solutions for a new way to deal with this problem.
"This woman" has taken an overdose of sleeping pills, but she has "dried out" and is awake if still groggy. She will not speak to me, will not show me her face. I talk anyway, ask standard questions from the case history form. The room is a padded cell, stripped of all pretenses of comfort, warmth, care. The woman is stripped bare too. I wonder why she has been deprived of her clothing. There was a time when I would have wondered what could have brought her to this condition. But the stories I have heard since I began working in this crisis intervention program have taught me the truth about women's private lives.
Night after night and day after day women enter emergency rooms all over the country, all over the world—ripped apart by knives, shattered by gunshot, beaten and broken from head to foot with fists, chairs, lead pipes, burned with cigarettes, raped by husbands, lovers, strangers, fathers, even mothers. Most of them want to talk. Some shout with anger, others whisper in shame. Some are in excruciating pain; others are paralyzed by fear of the man who has put them there. Will he return and finish her off? Where should she hide?
All of these women have stories to tell: stories that reverberate with images of the grotesque, as in a horror story or a Gothic novel. But these stories are true, and they have been silenced.
"This woman," whose wounds are not visible lesions, refuses to respond to my questions: What is your relationship to the abuser? How long have you been in this relationship? Describe the most recent incident. How did you get to the hospital? How have you been hurt in the past? Physically, verbally, sexually? What forms of abuse? Hit, Slap, Kick, Punch, Burn, Rape, Choke? Are your children safe now?
We ask these questions in a matter-of-fact tone, as if they were ordinary parts of peoples' lives—because they are. Women respond to the familiarity the questions evoke. Once a woman can admit such violent incidents have been happening for a long time, she feels better, she feels heard. The questions elicit frightening details.
What types of injuries have you suffered? What forms of treatment have they required? (Surgery? Hospitalization?) What types of weapons have been used? (Guns, Knives, TV sets?) How often? Have you been deprived of Sleep, Food, Clothing, Family, Friends? Is the abuser violent toward Children, Relatives, Strangers, Animals, Furniture? What kinds of threats does he make?
Eventually, "this woman" turns over, looks up at me. Her face! For the flash of an instant, I sense she has heard something new, something she's never been asked before. Then her eyes go dull. I sense the anger behind her blank stare and feel a chill pass through me. "She despises me," I think, "she despises my type." I understand why. She's been here before and not received the help she needed. She's had it with hospitals, nurses, doctors, social workers, and other "authorities" asking questions that have no known solutions. I know that our program is different, that we are finding ways to help women like her. But I can't seem to reach her. She looks away, rolls over to face the wall. Defeated, I turn to leave; but I feel something change behind me. She stands up, her face haunted, twisted in pain. In halting utterances she speaks, "Doesn't . . . matter . . . nothing ever changes." I take her hand and lead her into a different, more comfortable room with a couch, a desk, a phone. Side by side, we sit and address the questions on the questionnaire, and though she doesn't look at me again she answers each of them. During this moment, the book you now hold was born: listening, I began to recognize that "this woman's" life is more than a case history. Her life tells a story with characters, a setting, and a plot. This is not her first visit to the emergency room, but it is the first time she has been asked direct questions about her family life framed to invite a new interpretation. She has never discussed the chain of events that repeatedly causes her to overdose. Now she moves from telling what happened to asking what she can do and how we can help. Specifically we talk about the way her husband's behavior affects her life and the lives of her children.
When the resident psychiatrist joins us, we work together to explore new possibilities. We tell her about programs designed for people in her situation; we call shelters and counseling centers. We plan what to tell her husband when he comes to pick her up. To foster change, we must make him understand that his wife is not "crazy"; when she overdoses on sleeping pills, it is because she is desperate. He must be taught to see how his anger, violence, and oppressive behavior erase his wife as a human being and leave her in a state of despair. As a result of our intervention, she decides to postpone shelters but to seek counseling. Tomorrow she will return home with a sense of hope and an appointment with a family violence non-residential program. Weeks later as I walk through the outpatient area of the hospital, someone grabs my arm. I turn to see a woman in her mid-thirties. She wears blue jeans and a red T-shirt; her hair is in a ponytail, her face is scrubbed and glowing. She begins talking excitedly as if we were old friends, but both her hands grip my arm like a water skier holding onto a rope: Oh you made a difference things are so much better now we go places together we have fun and we even have a dog we went with the children and bought a dog he doesn't yell any more . . .
As she speaks I gradually realize she is the woman I met weeks earlier in the psychiatry department. I could not have recognized her face, animated and happy now, blank and distorted by suffering then. Indeed, I had no memory of her actual features. Invisible to herself and to her abusive husband, she had been invisible to me, unidentifiable as an individual. Now, with her life validated, her anonymity has disappeared, and the qualities that made her an individual assert themselves on her face. Recognizing her self, she became recognizable as a self.
Often I was privileged to witness the transformation that occurs when an interior identity becomes manifest. Nevertheless, I do not kid myself into believing that any woman's problems can end with one crisis-intervention interview. Patterns of the abuse cycle that operate in violent families are difficult to break. Most of the time, breaking the cycle means breaking free: leaving the abusive situation, for, as Lenore Walker found after years of research, "the cycle of violence, once begun, is nearly impossible to stop" (Walker 1989, 7).
Crimes Against Women
Movements to end family violence and crimes against women are rooted in the women's movement and the consciousness-raising activities of the late sixties and early seventies. As women told the truth about their lives, they began to feel less isolated. Female bonding across social circumstances revealed connections among women, and one of those connections was the violence women had experienced throughout history—and kept hidden. What began as political activism proliferated; women's voices echoed in research and scholarship across disciplines in colleges and universities throughout the country. Women's studies classrooms, rape crisis programs, women's shelters, job counseling and training, transitional housing for women on the run from abusive husbands, and programs for abused children all resulted from these studies. Today, legal advocates continue to work for changes in outmoded laws that fail to punish perpetrators or that consider the history of abuse to be inadmissible evidence in divorce and self-defense trials.
The Way it is Now
Nevertheless in the family and on the street, violence perpetrated by loved ones or by strangers infects our culture in epidemic proportions. A woman is raped every three minutes; a woman is beaten in her home every fifteen seconds; one of four women who seek treatment for their injuries in hospital emergency rooms is a "battered" woman. "Upward of four million American women are beaten annually by current and former male partners, and between 2,000 to 4,000 women are murdered (Department of Justice, 1994). According to a Department of Justice press release in March 1995, "more than two-thirds of violent crimes against women are committed by husbands, boyfriends, or someone known to the women. One third of all women killed in the U. S. die at the hands of a husband or boyfriend.
On average each year from 1992 through 1996, about eight in 1,000 women and one in 1,000 men twelve years old or over experienced a violent victimization by a current or former spouse, girlfriend or boyfriend. Females are five to eight times more likely than males to be victimized by an intimate.3 Women are seven times more likely to kill in self-defense than are men; however, many more women die each year at the hands of their partners than kill their abusers (Walker 1989, 46; see also Browne and Jones). On the other hand, crimes committed by women against men have declined in recent years by twelve percent. Women who murder their abusers do not act out of premeditation. These murders usually happen in the midst of a beating to fend off attacks. In fact, most of the women tell officials that they still love their abusers and meant them no harm.
The Violence Against Women Act became law on November 20, 1993, requiring state and local officials to deal more efficiently with domestic violence. Two years later, effective October 1995, the Family Protection and Domestic Violence Intervention Act brought further improvements in local policies. With these changes, police must arrest perpetrators for violence against their families, even if the victims refuse to press charges. Thus, victims fearing retaliation from their abusers no longer can be asked whether or not they want the abuser arrested (http://www.divorcesource.com/NY/DS/vanzon.html).
As the movement to identify and shelter victims of violence progressed, a paradox evolved. Women came to be seen as helplessly dependent on men or on social programs and in need of "recovery" from their fear of further violence and/or rape. "Learned helplessness" was the term coined to describe the complex response women received from social agencies, clergy, doctors and nurses, police and lawyers in the early years when too little help was available and laws failed to protect abused women. With time the term, originally intended to "blame" the agencies, became twisted in ways that "blamed the victims" as if they, rather than society, were inadequate to protect themselves.
This book seeks to set the record straight. Women who decide to make the journey from victim to survivor and beyond should not be greeted with condescending attitudes or derogatory labels. Labels that create an aura of weakness shadow the important message of strength their lives reflect. Women who rescue themselves from the effects of abuse and trauma and transcend their painful pasts should be celebrated as heroines of their own life stories.
The Point Is . . . .
This book celebrates the images of heroic women fighting for their rights, risking their lives, rescuing their children from a violent family life, testifying, speaking out, seeking justice when they are beaten, raped, or otherwise violated. The message is clear and strong: this is not a recovery book because it is not by or about sick women. Neither is this a self-help book. This collection of survival stories intends to inspire a sense of dignity, not in suffering but in the refusal to continue a life of helplessness and pain. These are courageous women who have survived the violence threatening their lives and have found their voices—voices fierce with the reality of self-insight.
Transcendence and the Writing Cure
Writing functions not only as catharsis of the soul but as a record of the heroic enterprise of regaining self-power. Transcendence becomes possible when, having told the story as it occurred, we begin to imagine a shift into a story of new possibilities. Transcendence proceeds through remembering, connecting, owning, and letting go, moving a violent event or pattern from inner to outer and then to inner again. Transcendence represents a turning point, a pivot in the healing process that shifts the life pattern so that a woman can move forward and away from the debilitating effects of her abuse. Ideally, then, telling these stories makes it possible to imagine other endings, alternative ways to live.
Healing through words, a writing/talking cure, is a primary focus of this book. The name Sara O. ("Baths," Section Three) recalls Anna O., the fictional name of Josef Breuer's patient, Bertha Pappenheim, the first case history in Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud, 1895). Anna O. has come to be known as the originator of the "talking cure" which is in fact a precursor to the "writing cure" effected later in life by this same woman. Exploring the connection between the writing/telling of autobiography as a source for discovering the self, we observe how language, telling, and healing operate as part of an interrelated system.
New possibilities emerge as the woman discovers a new identity by becoming the "subject who writes" rather than the victim who waits in silence. The writing, or story, becomes her "visible representation in the world" wherein she "inscribes herself in the text" (Herndl 1988, 53). Thus, the writer moves the inner reality outside of herself where she can objectify the pain and become the activator, or subject, of her own healing because she is in charge of defining her own reality.
For Beverly Hirsch, telling her story (Section Five) moved present painful issues into the past. Writing from her cell in a Colorado women's prison, she evaluates her process:
I think doing this has been the best therapy I could have done. I had to re-evaluate my goals and the whys. Look hard at my actions and see what was there . . . I just know that it's over, and now, you have all the emotions I have bottled up for eight years on nothing more than pieces of paper . . . so do as you choose, I am free, at last [editor's emphasis].
Her freedom rests on her willingness to claim responsibility for her actions. Owning the past, we move beyond its pull, not to forget but to incorporate its lessons while escaping the prison that locks us in the loop between pain and recovery, victim and survivor. We transcend. But the past informs the present and therefore molds and empowers our character. We dare not allow it to fester in silence. Nor dare we allow the past to become a blueprint for the future. The victim survives the imprint of the past, but the heroine transcends it and moves forward into a new life fueled by the energy it takes to own one's autobiography.
"Writing down our lives, not as lives but as stories of lives," permits us to gain possession, to claim ownership, of our pain and joy, trauma, and victory" (Jelinek 1980, 132). "All writers discover nothing has really happened until it has been written down" (Heilbrun 1990, 30). 7 But there are no miracles. In a letter accompanying her short story, "Halloween Flashback," Myrna Sharp (Section Two) conveys her clear understanding of the balm of such writing—and its limitations.
I would like to tell you that writing the story was cathartic and now I'm not upset anymore, but I can't. I think the process of getting it out there on the page did help detoxify the memory and alleviate some of the pain but it didn't make it go away. Unfortunately, these things never go away, [they] just get thrown in with the rest of one's experiences and life history. One just has to get beyond them. (My emphasis on "detoxify" and "get beyond." Quote is from private correspondence.)
Detoxification and transcendence: healing through self-expression and communication is not an ending, but a beginning; not a closure, but a disclosure; not a recovery, but a discovery of the power of language and the power of self, the power to name the conditions of our reality and thereby take charge of our own destiny.
As Dale Spender puts it: "In order to live in this world, we must name it. Names are essential for the construction of reality, for without a name it is difficult to accept the existence of an object, an event, a feeling" (Spender 1980, 163). Breaking the silence not only releases the pain, as Patti Tana's essay demonstrates, it gives the pain "a name and a face" (Section Two). Verbalizing the activities of our past, we create our own reality that reflects our lived experience rather than the cultural one that too often denies our own perceptions.
But healing is tempered by the stigma of the language we must use to heal. To reclaim the vision of woman as hero we must, as Mary Daly suggests, "reverse the reversals" that negate our lives (Daly 1979, 47). By reclaiming our life stories, we rebel against the discrimination that labels victims and survivors as sick or helpless. We thus acknowledge the strength necessary to overcome adversity and to write our life histories in terms of success.
Structure
This book is divided into seven sections, arranged according to predominating themes and in the pattern a journey might take: When "Silent Woman Speaks" (Section One), she redefines the events of the past and generates a language that expresses our perceptions. Free of constrictions, "Thoughts after Rape" (Section Two) explores the continuum of sexual violence fostered by a social system that privileges male over female. Challenging that system gives rape "a name and a face" and frees us to light the "Dark Pages" (Section Three) of childhood, which all too often reveal abuse and incest. The language of metaphor shapes memories: "Grinding Axes" (Section Four) wages word battles to call attention to the price women pay for accepting society's definitions of gender. "Behind His Walls" (Section Five) explores imprisonment, both actual and metaphorical, to unlock the bars of social discrimination and prepare us for rebirth. The "strength and fragility of the rose," a symbol of "Regeneration" (Section Six) captures the moments of rebirth. "She Said NO!" (Section Seven) creates a paradoxical affirmation of female strength. The closing hymn, "My Name is Gloria," celebrates a "New Gloria" whose dreams of autonomy and self-definition are fulfilled.
In the following pages, life meets art; reality meets fiction; case history meets autobiography. These are women's stories as they have lived them and as they understand them to be true. These are their histories as we record them, their narratives as they dramatize them, their words as they speak them.