Fortunes of Feminism (13 page)

In this case, as in so many others, feminist activists contested established discursive boundaries and politicized what had previously been a depoliticized phenomenon. In addition, they reinterpreted the experience of battery and posited a set of associated needs. Here, they situated battered women's needs in a long chain of in-order-to relations which spilled across conventional separations of “spheres”; they claimed that, in order to be free from dependence on batterers, battered women needed not just temporary shelter but also jobs paying a “family wage,” day care, and affordable permanent housing. Further, feminists created new discourse publics, new spaces and institutions in which such oppositional need interpretations could be developed and from which they could be spread to wider publics. Finally, feminists modified elements of the authorized means of interpretation and communication; they coined new terms of description and analysis and devised new ways of addressing female subjects. In their discourse, battered women were not addressed as individualized victims but as potential feminist activists, members of a politically constituted collectivity.

This discursive intervention was accompanied by feminist efforts to provide for some of the needs they had politicized and reinterpreted. Activists organized battered women's shelters, places of refuge and of consciousness-raising. The organization of these shelters was non-hierarchical; there were no clear lines between staff and users. Many of the counselors and organizers had themselves been battered, and a high percentage of the women who used the shelters went on to counsel other battered women and to become movement activists. Concomitantly, these women came to adopt new self-descriptions. Whereas most had originally blamed themselves and defended their batterers, many came to reject that interpretation in favor of a politicized view that offered them new models of agency. In addition, these women modified their affiliations and social identifications. Whereas most had earlier felt identified with their batterers, many came instead to affiliate with other women.

This organizing eventually had an impact on wider discursive publics. By the late 1970s, feminists had largely succeeded in establishing domestic violence against women as a bona fide political issue. They managed in some cases to change attitudes and policies of police and the courts, and they won for this issue a place on the informal political agenda. Now the needs of battered women were sufficiently politicized to become candidates for publicly organized satisfaction. Finally, in several municipalities and localities, movement shelters began receiving local government funding.

From the feminist perspective, this represented a significant victory, but it was not without cost. Municipal funding brought with it a variety of new administrative constraints ranging from accounting procedures to regulation, accreditation, and professionalization requirements. As a consequence, publicly funded shelters underwent a transformation. Increasingly, they came to be staffed by professional social workers, many of whom had not themselves experienced battery. Thus, a division between professional and client supplanted the more fluid continuum of relations that characterized the earlier shelters. Moreover, since many social-work staffs have been trained to frame problems in a quasi-psychiatric perspective, this perspective structures the practices of many publicly funded shelters even despite the intentions of individual staff, many of whom are politically committed feminists. Consequently, the practices of such shelters have become more individualizing and less politicized. Battered women tend now to be positioned as clients. They are increasingly psychiatrized, addressed as victims with deep, complicated selves. They are only rarely addressed as potential feminist activists. Increasingly, the language-game of therapy has supplanted that of consciousness-raising. And the neutral scientific language of “spousal abuse” has supplanted more political talk of “male violence against women.” Finally, the needs of battered women have been substantially reinterpreted. The far-reaching earlier claims for the social and economic prerequisites of independence have tended to give way to a narrower focus on the individual woman's problems of “low self-esteem.”
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The battered women's shelter case exemplifies one tendency of needs politics in late-capitalist societies: the tendency for the politics of need interpretation to devolve into the administration of need satisfaction. However, there is also a countertendency which runs from administration to client resistance and potentially back to politics. I would like now to document this countertendency by discussing four examples of client resistance, examples ranging from the individual, cultural, and informal to the collective, political, and formally organized.

First, individuals may locate some space for maneuver within the administrative framework of a government agency. They may displace and/or modify an agency's official interpretations of their needs, even without mounting an overt challenge. Historian Linda Gordon has uncovered examples of this sort of resistance in the records of child-protection agencies during the Progressive Era.
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Gordon cites cases in which women who had been beaten by their husbands filed complaints alleging child abuse. Having involved case workers in their situations by invoking an interpreted need that was recognized as legitimate and as falling within the agency's jurisdiction, they managed to interest the case workers in a need that was not so recognized. In some cases, these women succeeded in securing intervention under the child abuse rubric that provided them some measure of relief from domestic battery. Thus, they informally broadened the agency's jurisdiction to include, indirectly, a hitherto excluded need. While citing the social state's official definition of their need, they simultaneously displaced that definition and brought it closer in line with their own interpretations.

Second, informally organized groups may develop practices and affiliations that are at odds with the social state's way of positioning them as clients. In so doing, they may alter the uses and meanings of benefits provided by government agencies, even without explicitly calling these into question. Anthropologist Carol Stack has documented examples of this sort of resistance in her study of “domestic kin networks” among poor black AFDC recipients in a Midwestern city in the late 1960s.
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Stack describes elaborate kinship arrangements that organize delayed exchanges or “gifts” of prepared meals, food stamps, cooking, shopping, groceries, sleeping space, cash (including wages and AFDC allowances), transportation, clothing, child care, even children. It is significant that these domestic kin networks span several physically distinct households. This means that AFDC recipients use their benefits beyond the confines of the principal administrative category of government relief programs, namely, “the household.” Consequently, these clients circumvent the nuclear-familializing procedures of welfare administration. By utilizing benefits beyond the confines of a “household,” they alter the state-defined meanings of those benefits and, thus, of the needs they purport to satisfy. At the same time, they indirectly contest the state's way of positioning them as subjects. Whereas AFDC addresses them as biological mothers who belong to deviant nuclear families which lack male breadwinners, they double that subject-position with another one, namely, members of socially, as opposed to biologically, constituted kin networks who cooperate in coping with dire poverty.

Third, individuals and/or groups may resist therapeutic initiatives of the social state while accepting material aid. They may reject state-sponsored therapeutic constructions of their life-stories and capacities for agency and insist instead on alternative narratives and conceptions of identity. Sociologist Prudence Rains has documented an example of this kind of resistance in her comparative study of the “moral careers” of black and white pregnant teenagers in the late 1960's.
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Rains contrasts the ways the two groups of young women related to therapeutic constructions of their experience in two different institutional settings. The young middle-class white women were in an expensive, private, residential facility. This facility combined traditional services, such as seclusion and a cover for “good girls who had made a mistake,” with newer therapeutic services, including required individual and group counseling sessions with psychiatric social workers. In these sessions, the young women were addressed as deep, complicated selves. They were encouraged to regard their pregnancies not as simple “mistakes,” but as unconsciously motivated, meaningful acts expressive of latent emotional problems. This meant that a girl was to interpret her pregnancy (and the sex which was its superficial cause) as a form of acting out—say, a refusal of parental authority or a demand for parental love. She was warned that, unless she came to understand and acknowledge these deep, hidden motives, she would likely not succeed in avoiding future “mistakes.”

Rains documents the process by which most of the young white women at this facility came to internalize this perspective and to rewrite themselves in the psychiatric idiom. She records the narratives they devised in the course of rewriting their “moral careers.” For example:

When I first came here I had it all figured out in my mind that Tom . . . had kind of talked me into it and I gave in. I kind of put it all on him. I didn't really accept my own part it it . . . [H]ere they stressed a lot that if you don't realize why you're here or why you ended up here and the emotional reasons behind it, that it will happen again . . . I feel now that I have a pretty full understanding of why I did end up here and that there was an emotional reason for it. And I accept my part in it more. It wasn't just him. (93)

This narrative is interesting in several respects. As Rains notes, the exchange of a “mistake” view of the past for a psychiatric view provided certain comforts: the new interpretation “did not merely set aside the past but accounted for it, and accounted for it in ways which allowed girls to believe they would act differently in the future” (94). Thus, the psychiatric view offers the pregnant teenager a model of agency that seems to enhance her capacity for individual self-determination. On the other hand, the narrative is highly selective, avowing some aspects of the past while disavowing others. It plays down the narrator's sexuality, treating her sexual behavior and desires as epiphenomenal “manifestation[s] of other, deeper, and nonsexual emotional needs and problems” (93). In addition, it defuses the potentially explosive issue of consent versus coercion in the teenage heterosexual milieu by excusing Tom and by revising the girl's earlier sense that their intercourse was not fully consensual. Moreover, the narrative forecloses any question as to the legitimacy of “premarital sex,” assuming that for a woman, at least, such sex is morally wrong. Finally, in light of the girls' declarations that they will not need contraceptives when they return home and resume dating, the narrative has yet another meaning. Encapsulating a new awareness of deep emotional problems, it becomes a shield against future pregnancies, a prophylactic. Given these elisions in the story, a skeptic might well conclude that the psychiatric promise of enhanced self-determination is largely illusory.

The relative ease with which Rains's white teenagers internalized the therapeutic interpretation of their situation stands in stark contrast with the resistance offered by her black subjects. The young black women in her study were clients in a nonresidential municipal facility providing prenatal care, schooling, and counseling sessions with a psychiatric social worker. The counseling sessions were similar in intent and design to those at the private residential facility; the young women were encouraged to talk about their feelings and to probe the putative deep, emotional causes of their pregnancies. However, this therapeutic approach was much less successful at the public facility. These young women resisted the terms of the psychiatric discourse and the language-game of question and answer employed in the counseling sessions. They disliked the social worker's stance of nondirectiveness and moral neutrality—her unwillingness to say what
she
thought—and they resented what they considered her intrusive, overly personal questions. These girls did not acknowledge her right to question them in this fashion, given that they could not ask “personal” questions of her in turn. Rather, they construed “personal questioning” as a privilege reserved to close friends and intimates under conditions of reciprocity.

Rains documents several dimensions of the young black women's resistance to the “mental health” aspects of the program. In some instances, they openly challenged the rules of the therapeutic language-game. In others, they resisted indirectly by humor, quasi-deliberately misunderstanding the social worker's vague, nondirective, yet “personal” questions. For example, one girl construed “How did you get pregnant?” as a “stupid” question and replied, “Shouldn't you know?” (136).

Some others subjected the constant therapeutic “How did it feel?” to an operation that can only be called “carnivalesque.” The occasion was a group counseling session for which the case worker was late. The young women assembled for the meeting began speculating as to her whereabouts. One mentioned that Mrs. Eckerd had gone to see a doctor. The conversation continued:

“To see if she's pregnant.”

“She probably thinks that's where you get babies.”

“Maybe the doctor's going to give her a baby” . . .

Bernice then started doing an imitation interview pretending she was a social worker asking questions of a pretend-pregnant Mrs. Eckerd, “Tell me, how did it feel? Did you like it?”

This brought a storm of laughter, and everybody started mimicking questions they supposedly had had put to them. Someone said, “She asked me did I want to put my baby for adoption, and how did it feel?”