{"id":7687,"date":"2015-10-15T11:00:57","date_gmt":"2015-10-15T15:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/?p=7687"},"modified":"2021-07-19T08:03:12","modified_gmt":"2021-07-19T12:03:12","slug":"domestic-violence-in-the-1970s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/2015\/10\/15\/domestic-violence-in-the-1970s\/","title":{"rendered":"Domestic Violence in the 1970s"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post is the first in a series<\/a> exploring the history of nursing and domestic violence from the guest blogger Catherine Jacquet<\/a>, and Assistant Professor of History and Women\u2019s and Gender Studies at Louisiana State University and guest curator of NLM’s exhibition <\/em>Confronting Violence: Improving Women\u2019s Lives<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

During the early 1970s, domestic violence remained largely unrecognized and virtually ignored in the legal, medical, and social spheres. Indeed, family violence in general was largely dismissed at this time. For its first thirty years of publication from 1939 to 1969, for example, The Journal of Marriage and Family<\/a><\/em> did not include \u201cviolence\u201d in its index. 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<\/a>, \u201cvirtually nonexistent.\u201d 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. The same researcher commented that the \u201cprevailing attitude in the sixties\u201d was that spouse abuse \u201cwas rare, and when it did occur, was the product of mental illness or a psychological disorder.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\"Advertisement:<\/a>
Ms<\/em>. magazine, founded in 1971, ran a regular feature \u201cNo Comment\u201d that encouraged readers to send in sexist advertisements and other media.
Printed in Ms. Magazine, July 1973<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Culturally, woman battering was deemed a \u201cprivate matter\u201d and one not worth intervening into. Police and medical practitioners alike were reluctant to intervene into \u201cprivate affairs,\u201d or what was then deemed \u201cmatters between a husband and his wife.\u201d By all accounts, wife abuse was also an accepted custom and often regarded with humor. This was reflected in an early 1970s ad for a Michigan bowling alley. \u201cHAVE SOME FUN,\u201d the copy read in bold letters, \u201cBEAT YOUR WIFE TONIGHT.\u201d<\/p>\n

There were few services available for abused women in crisis. While there were shelters or temporary housing for those categorized as homeless or displaced, an understanding of \u201cabused woman\u201d as a separate category of person who sought shelter or support services did not yet exist. Battered women found themselves with little to no social support and no place to go. In 1973 Los Angeles, for example, homeless shelters provided 1000 beds for men, and only 30 beds for women.<\/p>\n

Over the course of the next decade, the interest in domestic violence would shift from virtual neglect to a significant social concern. This shift was the direct result of 1970s feminist activism. Organizing under the banner of \u201cwe will not be beaten,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\"Crowd<\/a>
Women rally in City Hall Plaza, in Boston to speak out against violence against women, August 26, 1976<\/a>
\u00a9Ellen Shub 2015 all other rights reserved<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The battered women\u2019s 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. 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. By the end of the decade, many groups took on the work of the battered women\u2019s movement.<\/p>\n

As a result of widespread feminist agitation, understandings and responses to battered women rapidly changed. As feminist activist Susan Schechter recalled in her account of the battered women\u2019s movement<\/a>, by the early 1980s, \u201cin contrast to just one decade earlier, battered women are no longer invisible.\u201d Between 1975 and 1978, more than 170 battered women\u2019s shelters opened across the country. In 1978, the US Commission on Civil Rights named over 300 shelters, hotlines, and groups advocating for abused women. In the span of less than a decade, significant gains were made. A researcher in the early 1980s found that the battered woman\u2019s movement had made substantial headway in terms of providing emergency shelter, legislation reform, establishing or extending government policy and programs, and stimulating a proliferation of research and public information on domestic violence. Noticeably absent from this list was medical reform. Indeed, while an outburst of activity came from the government, law, research, and social service agencies, the medical establishment remained conspicuously absent from the conversation.<\/p>\n

\"Four<\/a>
Brigham and Women\u2019s Hospital, an organization on the vanguard of identifying and treating women who were battered, sponsors a neighborhood health fair, 1980<\/a>
Courtesy Brigham and Women\u2019s Hospital Archives, Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard University<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Learn more about why NLM is hosting this important exhibition<\/a>, and read about the traveling banner exhibition in <\/em>The Washington Post<\/a>.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post is the first in a series exploring the history of nursing and domestic violence from the guest blogger<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19605840,"featured_media":17673,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Domestic Violence in the 1970s - #NoViolenceNLM","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[42333869,12763,51873791,2029,51014,2347],"tags":[24743,6722,10941,678875802,9807,553,7193,97077],"class_list":["post-7687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives-manuscripts","category-collections","category-confronting-violence","category-exhibitions","category-guests","category-series","tag-1970s","tag-activism","tag-civil-rights","tag-confronting-violence","tag-domestic-violence","tag-feminism","tag-nursing","tag-womens-history"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/OB11144_feature.jpg?fit=900%2C400&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3xcDk-1ZZ","jetpack-related-posts":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19605840"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7687"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21641,"href":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7687\/revisions\/21641"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}