Whatever happened to Erin Pizzey?

From time to time, my life has touched on issues of Domestic Abuse (which is the interesting new name for Domestic Violence) and I recently turned up the name of Erin Pizzey. If you were around in the 1970s, you may remember that she started one of the first Women's Refuges. Wrote a book too "Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear"

So, you'd expect her to be a elder stateswoman of the women's movement and feature in the "History" section of appropriate websites. You'd be wrong. Bizarrely, counter-intuitively even, she's a heroine of the men's movement.

So what went "wrong"?

In her time working in refuges, Erin came across many violent men (which you'd expect) but also many violent women (which surprised her). Women who attacked other women in the refuge. So she started to challenge the "nasty men hitting nice women" image. Worse still she wrote another book about it "Prone to Violence" which suggested that some women are not only violent, they seek out violent men.

So that's why you don't hear much about Erin these days - especially from the women's movement.

It's interesting.

Links:
Text of Prone to Violence
Erin's blog
Wikipedia article about Erin
How feminists tried to destroy the family Erin in the Daily Mail