Abstract
This is a case study of Transition House in Cambridge, MA, a pioneering feminist agency founded in 1976. Transition House has survived and is, today, a thriving agency. Based on interviews with and papers collected from those involved in founding and running it, as well as a few guests/clients, I argue that Transition House’s evolution was impelled by three major forces shared with other early domestic violence agencies: changes in the culture due in part to successes of the battered women’s movement in the early years, changes in the larger political–economic context due to national policies and economic trends, which make getting out of poverty in 2017 more difficult than it was in the 1970s, and learning from survivors and from evolving research on domestic violence. In 1976, the immediate focus was on women “battered” by their partners, and the agency was strongly identified with the women’s movement. In 2017, the focus is on women who are battered by economic and social conditions as much as by their partners, and the agency is seen as a partner with the city and with other nonprofit agencies.
Introduction
The Battered Women’s Movement had its origins in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of the movement for broad changes in gender relationships known as “women’s liberation.” Forty years later, agencies and policies with roots in that movement exist in a changed context and face different challenges. This article examines one pioneering feminist agency, Transition House in Cambridge, MA, for its “story” of development in the movement to end domestic violence.
Founded as a feminist collectively run shelter in 1976, Transition House has survived and is, today, a thriving agency. Originally identified strongly with feminism and the Women’s Movement, today, it is seen as a community agency more than a feminist agency, although it is run and staffed primarily by women and serves mostly women and children. While its mission to end domestic violence has not changed, its governance, programs, and practices have. The transition from loyalty to the feminist founding principles of nonhierarchical governance, local private funding, and primarily volunteer staff was gradual: Public funding replaced much of the local individual funding, paid staff supplanted the primarily volunteer staff, and in 1996–1998, the collective governance structure was abandoned for a more traditional hierarchical model. For more than a decade after that, there were struggles over leadership. In the last few years, it has emerged as a strong agency with close ties to city departments and to other local nonprofits. For a few of its earlier volunteers, “it is the antithesis of what it set out to be.” Others see that it has “always been a special place,” as it has adapted to a changed environment.
My analysis of this history is based on interviews with those who were important in founding and in running it over the four decades as well as a few current and former clients/guests. 1 In addition, I had access to relevant papers and files of many of those I interviewed as well as material from Transition House’s early years conserved at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America in Cambridge, MA.
In May 2013, the executive director of Transition House invited former volunteers/employees, as well as the founders, to launch the “history project.” About 35 people attended, shared their memories of Transition House, and added information to a time line on the wall of the meeting room. Those attending agreed to be interviewed and offered to donate or lend their papers from Transition House. Interviews with the original group led, through a snowball method, to my conducting 63 interviews usually of an hour or more which were recorded when the interviewee permitted. In addition, I collected bags and boxes of papers. The history of Transition House that resulted in 2014 was book length Fleck-Henderson (2014). A draft was offered to all interviewees for review, and their suggested changes were in every case accepted. This article is an analysis of the material in that history plus interviews in 2017 with current staff and partner agencies.
I argue that Transition House’s evolution was impelled by three major forces shared with other early domestic violence agencies: (1) The environment changed due largely to successes of the battered women’s movement in the early years which led to public recognition of domestic violence as a social issue and government support for domestic violence agencies. (2) At the same time, regressive national policies made escaping poverty more difficult in succeeding decades than it was in the 1970s. (3) Learning from survivors and from evolving research on domestic violence led to changes in practice and a more complex analysis of the issue of domestic violence.
Transition House has adapted to these forces with continuous incremental changes in programs and policies as well as two periods of fairly radical change. This article describes each of the influencing factors with material from interviews and Transition House documents. The final section focuses on the periods of biggest change in 1996–1998 and again in 2012–2016.
Literature Review
The story of the Battered Women’s Movement has often been told as a story of co-option. As early as 1982, Susan Schechter saw the demands of providing services to domestic violence survivors threatening to eclipse the larger social change purpose (Schechter, 1982, pp. 242 ff). Studies in 2004 and 2008 found that advocates in domestic violence organizations often lack a political analysis of the issue or have difficulty integrating such an analysis with the realities of providing service in an agency (Hammons, 2004; Lehrner & Allen, 2008). Other work suggests that funders’ pressures pushed domestic violence agencies toward hierarchical organizational structures, professional staffing and away from political missions and actions (Durazo, 2007; Lehrner & Allen, 2009). A recent study of domestic violence coalitions in the United States found that, “[o]nly 5 (9.8%) of the 51 coalitions self-identified as feminist organizations or explicitly indicated that their services were informed by feminist values, theories, or politics” (Barrett, Almanssori, Kwan, & Waddick, 2016, p. 363).
A different perspective separates the evolution of the state’s response to sexual and domestic violence from that of local organizations (Bumiller, 2008). While highly critical of the modern state’s response, Bumiller sees feminist organizations maintaining “semiautonomy” from the state. She writes, The consequences of moving into the terrain of the state are still widely debated; some see these transformations as a betrayal of grassroots sensibilities, while most see these changes as an inevitable outcome of growth and stability. Overall, the majority of these organizations have been successful at maintaining their feminist identity. The foundational goal of empowering women was not lost; rather, new strategies were developed as the conditions for this empowerment changed. (Bumiller, 2008, p. 4)
Two recent pieces highlight differing views of the challenges presented by domestic violence work. Edleson, Lindhorst, and Kanuha (2015) write about gender-based violence as one of the “grand challenges for social work,” outlining the progress that has been made and can be made with a scientific approach to assessment and intervention. Mehrotra, Kimball, and Wahab (2016) suggest that larger societal forces, specifically neoliberalism, criminalization, and professionalization, shape and constrain what social workers can do and that these forces must also be critically examined.
Transition House today is funded largely by government (federal, state, and local) grants and therefore part of the “state apparatuses” (Walker, 1990). It has, as Bumiller asserts, maintained its focus on empowering women, evolving “new strategies” as societal and local conditions radically changed between 1976 and 2017. While a first-generation agency, in Arnold’s and Ake’s terminology, Transition House’s attention to intersecting oppressions resembles that of the second generation activists, as does its recent organizing and outreach work in the community. On the other hand, government funding and its current partnerships with city departments tie it closely to the state. It has struggled through the decades to maintain a critique of current political systems while being increasingly dependent on and embedded in them.
Forces for Change: Early Successes, Learning, a Changed Environment
Early Successes
Transition House began in January 1976 when two women opened their apartment to women fleeing abuse. By the end of the 1970s, Cambridge had a functioning domestic violence shelter located in a house it owned, and it served as a model for new shelters elsewhere. Its staff was figuring out how to run a shelter consistent with feminist principles. The group that organized and ran the house was in the forefront of changes all over the country. A state coalition was active, a local group for men who battered was up and running, a new state law created the option of protective orders for domestic violence victims, and training materials were developed that were widely used and copied. In a few years, an astounding amount had been accomplished. A Federal Office on Domestic Violence opened in 1979, and Federal legislation passed in 1984.
Establishing a Shelter as Part of the Women’s Movement
In 1975, Cherie Jimenez and Chris Womenez, both single mothers on welfare living in Cambridge, MA, began to discuss the possibility of a refuge for women escaping partners who abused them. Both women had, themselves, been in abusive marriages. Cambridge had an active feminist community. The Cambridge Women’s Center had been founded a few years earlier, and a radical group calling itself “Cell 16” included women concerned about “battered wives,” most notably Betsy Warrior (1974/1969). With the support of local feminists, Chris and Cherie, in January 1976, opened one of their apartments as a refuge for women fleeing abuse and called it Transition House. Transition House was one of the first dedicated domestic violence shelters in the United States, following Women’s Advocates in Minnesota, and it was the first in New England (Schechter, 1982, Women’s Advocates, 1980). “Soon the apartment was overflowing with women and children” (Leghorn, 1976).
In August, a big rally in Boston raised enough donations for the expanded core group of Transition House supporters to plan for a building of their own. Reflecting on that time Chris says: “Women were idealistic, seeing a whole new kind of life.” Cherie remembers: “We had the sense that it was greater than a program or a shelter. It was women together, solidarity.”
By that November, the Transition House group had about 30 committed volunteers and a rented house for the shelter. All the women in the core group worked far more than a normal workweek. They were organizing and staffing a shelter and building a movement.
For many years, most funds came in the form of small donations. Volunteers made beautiful cards and sent out notes to everyone they knew. “A very touching thing about T House history was our carefully nurtured mailing list. Many former battered women and other poor women would send us as little as $5.00 a month.” A big boost came in 1977 when a local radio station (WEEI) had a fund-raising campaign for Transition House. That effort raised enough money for a down payment on a house which was to be a permanent residence for the shelter. The building was in what one volunteer described as “very tough shape,” which was the reason for its modest price of US$24,000. For a few months, Transition House closed the shelter and operated the hotline out of a staff apartment, while staff, volunteers, and some guests worked on rehabilitating their new purchase. Transition House’s shelter still occupies that building, which has been rehabilitated a number of times.
Transition House grounded its collective in what it called “Principles of Unity.” The introduction to that document reveals their attention to structural oppressions beyond those of patriarchy. We believe that violence against women must be seen in the context of the oppression of all women in our society. Women have historically been denied power in our society; the power for ourselves and our children, the power to control our own bodies, and the power to make decisions affecting our lives. Violence against women—whether battering, rape or other forms of violence—is the extreme denial of our power. African American[s], Latina/os, Native Americans and Asians, people with immigrant refugee status, etc. also suffer from racism by which they are denied equal access to education jobs, etc. and are invalidated because of cultural differences. Racism has also been and is today, used as an excuse for violence, lynching, racist beatings, etc. The working class are exploited because they are at the bottom of a class stratified society, one whose interest in making profit is greater than its interest in human welfare. Lesbians and gay men face discrimination and denial of basic civil rights because they love persons of the same sex. These various forms of oppression are institutionalized such as in the legal system, yet they are also acted out individually in people’s attitudes, individual attacks and battering. (Principles of Unity, n.d., p. 1) We encourage collectivity and cooperation and are opposed to competition and hierarchy. We will work to change hierarchical structure as it exists in the House and make decision-making power accessible to everyone who works at Transition house. (Principles of Unity, n.d., p. 4)
Beginnings of Government and Mainstream Funding
Through the next decade, Transition House gradually accepted support from nonmovement sources, as both government and community entities sought to address domestic violence. In 1978, volunteers/staff from Transition House participated in a national women’s conference in Houston, TX, where a caucus on battered women advocated regional and national coalitions. There were by then 11 Massachusetts programs for battered women. Following a signal from the state that money could be available if all the programs collaborated, representatives of the programs came together to form the Massachusetts Coalition of Battered Women Service Groups (The Coalition). This group helped write the request for proposals to which they then responded, getting the first state money for domestic violence programs in Massachusetts. “By the time the state issued the request for proposals, we had helped shape the focus of the funding,” one participant reported. Perhaps because the activists felt in charge of the process, there were no apparent doubts about this move into government funding. While there was still active grassroots fund-raising, public money was already part of its budget 2 years after Transition House opened in an apartment.
In the 1980s, Transition House began to accept money also from the United Way. That decision was more difficult for the collective than accepting state money. Distrust of those outside the movement was strong, but grassroots funding, even with the state contributing, was no longer sufficient. Given the secret location, United Way representatives were not allowed a site visit. When, after a few years of contributing, the United Way insisted on a visit, the representatives were taken blindfolded by a circuitous route to and from the shelter (personal communication from both the Transition House driver and one of the United Way representatives.) The story of the blindfolded funders became an important part of the oral history of Transition House. It seems to represent a milestone between the determined self-sufficiency of the founding years and the social service status of the later years.
The first federal grant came in 1978 through the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act. Transition House received US$10,000 purportedly to hire a social worker. In fact, the money was used to support part-time salaries for about five people who worked on fund raising, volunteer coordination, childcare, and weekend staffing. The year1984 saw passage of the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act which was succeeded in 1994 by the Violence Against Women Act, making federal money available to domestic violence programs. One Transition House respondent referred to passage of national legislation as “such a validation of the work.” “Finally the Federal Government recognized it [domestic violence] was an epidemic and a problem. It opened up more help for women.” Transition House was not directly involved in creating this legislation. The Coalition had become the local lobbying group, joined in this case by some Massachusetts state prosecutors who were invested in a stronger legal framework.
Building the Movement Through Training
Training was the major movement-building effort, as much a focus as the shelter. During the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of volunteers and staff attended Transition House trainings, as well as police, health agencies, welfare offices, and other city and state workers. A founder of another shelter noted, “Transition House was the mother of the Domestic Violence Movement in Massachusetts.” Transition House staff also traveled all over the country to help other groups start shelters.
An early training manual included duties while on shift, legal and welfare advocacy, and analysis of systemic oppression. The last focused on patriarchy but also spoke about race and class oppression. As one interviewee said, “Our purpose was both to minister to women and to be the revolution.” The Transition House Training Manual from the late-1980s added sections on women with “other emotional issues” and on supporting battered lesbians. Need for these latter topics had become clear with experience.
When efforts to work with and train the police on responding to domestic violence were frustrating, Transition House and its allies formed the Battered Women’s Action Committee which worked on drafting a new state law, the Abuse Prevention Act. That law, passed in July 1978, created the option of protective orders for domestic violence victims in Massachusetts.
Some women at Transition House and at Respond, a domestic violence organization in neighboring Somerville, wanted their partners to receive help. A small group of men associated with local feminists met with Transition House and Respond staff to study how one might work with batterers. Importantly influenced by the writings of Transition House pioneers Betsy Warrior and Lisa Leghorn, that group, with the leadership of David Adams, opened Emerge in 1978. The new “batterer intervention programs” recognized that men were key to the issue: They needed to be held accountable for abusive behavior and provided opportunities to change. Emerge increasingly served men referred from the courts, as domestic violence became defined as a crime. It continued to partner with Transition House, especially in prevention programming for schools in the 1980s to mid-1990s and recently in broader community training.
Possibility and Need for Collaboration in the City
The early successes created the possibility, and then the need, for more collaborative relations with established institutions, but Transition House was still mistrustful of organizations outside of the Movement. The efforts of the 1970s had created domestic violence as an issue of public concern. By the mid-1980s, many legal, social service, and health agencies had at least some training on domestic violence, public money was available, and there were laws and policies intended to benefit battered women. In the 1980s, Cambridge had a newly formed Women’s Commission, the director of which had been head of another domestic violence agency. She reported that she found Transition House’s “bunker mentality” a barrier to collaboration with the city. Reflecting on her experience working at Transition House in the 1980s, one person noted: “The staff still felt that ‘we are crusaders…it is us against the world.’” Suspicion of the establishment was part of the Transition House culture.
In 1985, Transition House and Emerge developed the Dating Violence Intervention Project, which, by its location in the public schools, demanded collaboration with the city. It became Transition House’s “ambassador” to the city during the decade following as well as a model for programs throughout the country.
The very successes of the early movement made some of its original commitments unworkable, and the mid-1980s through the 1990s saw tension between Transition House’s founding principles and the realities of running its programs. As domestic violence became a public issue with public funding, grassroots financial and volunteer support decreased. In 1978, there were a few people on part-time salaries and about 80 volunteers. By 1997, there were 8 full-time and 7 part-time paid positions and 40 volunteers. Some saw a “generational” difference between the pioneers and the volunteers who came later. One respondent, a college student when she worked at Transition House in the 1980s, reflected: “Transition House staff felt part of a movement. My generation didn’t feel like part of a movement because of earlier successes.” Public funding also demanded new kinds of accountability to funders who often found Transition House’s collective governance troubling. Internally, the collective’s absence of hierarchy made it difficult to hold either volunteers or residents accountable for meeting their responsibilities, a problem that became more acute as volunteers were more often transient or career-oriented and residents had more complex issues. The success of domestic violence training created more “experts” in the larger community. Some of these were hired into other systems, but Transition House’s insular stance was a barrier to working together.
Changed Social/Economic Context
The work of Transition House is shaped largely by the consequences of decades of neoliberal policies (Belkin Martinez, 2014; Mehrotra, Kimball, & Wahab, 2016). Through the 1970s and 1980s, economic trends and national policies contributed to increased difficulty in finding housing or economic viability for those ready to leave shelter. Safety net programs were being cut, and housing in the greater Boston area was becoming increasingly expensive. As affordable housing became scarce, shelter stays got longer, and it became more common to find women at Transition House for whom the main issue was homelessness. These difficulties only increased through the 1990s and accelerated with the major recession in the early 2000s.
Less Affordable Housing
From the 1980s onward, the risks of extreme poverty and of homelessness for women who left home and sought shelter loomed larger. Housing prices in the Boston area, and in Cambridge in particular, boomed in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1996, rent control in Cambridge ended, and rents also escalated. Transition House’s Welcome Statement of 1976 indicated that women without children could stay for 4 weeks and women with children for 6. It read: “Hopefully this is enough time to allow you to find a new apartment, get financial assistance, or find a job” (Founders Meeting Transcript, n.d., p. 42). Recently, the housing advocate tells shelter residents: “If you go to the appointments and fill out all the applications, you should get housing in 3 years.”
Volunteers/staff from the 1980s and on reported that women seeking shelter at Transition House were sometimes fleeing homelessness more than the immediate threat of violence. One person who worked at Transition House from the mid-1980s until the late 1990s reported, At first, the women were running for their lives. Later we got people who were savvy to the system. If you go to a DV shelter, you get housing faster. Being battered was not why they are there—primarily about housing. They were more likely to bring in guys or give away the location. Also, more people had mental illness and addiction issues.
Fewer Sources of Income for Women Without Advanced Training and With Children
For people without college education, job training, or job experience, it became more difficult to find work as the local economy moved away from manufacturing and into scientific, medical, and technical fields. At the same time, access to public welfare for women with children became more limited. Grants from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) declined steadily from the 1970s (Page & Larner, 1997, p. 24), and AFDC ended with the passage of The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, also known as “welfare reform.”
Transition House began a Savings Incentive Program in 1984, indicating awareness that the women needed help and support to build sufficient resources to move on. In 1995, a more ambitious Education and Employment Readiness Program was launched, staffed by trained educators. Although the residents had always lacked financial resources, poverty became more of an issue from the 1980s. “Early on our residents could have been living across the street from you,” one respondent told me, “Not as much now; more are really poor.”
A Changing Population
After 1970, the immigrant population of the country quadrupled (Grieco, 2014). In Cambridge in 2009–2013, more than 27% of the population was foreign born, about twice the national average (Community Development Department, 2011; U.S. Census Bureau, 2014). Transition House clients reflect these changes. They often face cultural and language barriers to employment and housing, as well as new forms of gender-based violence, such as the threat of honor killings. For today’s shelter residents, a host of ancillary services related to economic survival must be accessible: for example, language classes, literacy education, economic literacy education, and job readiness programs.
Erosion of Community Mental Health Services
Other parts of the social safety net frayed in the years after 1980. Direct Federal spending for community mental health services was replaced by block grants to states in 1981. A longtime volunteer commented, “In the 1990s there were more residents with alcohol and drug issues. We did not know how to do it and struggled with empathy versus (setting) limits.” The decades since have seen continued reductions in spending for such services (Bazelon Center, 2009). There are waiting lists for mental health care for children and adults in Cambridge. In addition, many agencies do not have language capabilities to meet the needs of immigrants who use Transition House services.
Changes in the national political and economic context since the 1970s are a critical influence on the evolution of Transition House. More women have independent financial resources than in 1976, but those women are not seeking help from Transition House. Transition House clients are poor financially, often lack marketable skills in today’s economy, and face barriers created by intersecting oppressions. For them, attaining housing and work is far more difficult than it was for the early residents of Transition House. From the beginning, Transition House documents indicate awareness of multiple oppressions, but in the context of the 1970s, those running the agency, and probably those coming to it for refuge, were focused on escaping male violence. By the 1990s, it was evident that fleeing abuse often left many problems unsolved and could create new ones.
Learning
Before the mid-1970s, domestic violence was a private experience, and there was no collective knowledge. The learning since then is inextricably intertwined with economic and cultural changes already discussed. Arnold and Ake (2013) note five areas of growth for first-generation organizations, four of which were evident in Transition House: Increased recognition of the “multiple life-generated risks” women weigh in addition to the risk of battering, economic action programs (noted above), feminist mental health interventions, and attention to self-care strategies for those working with survivors. As the complexity of domestic violence became clear, the original feminist analysis was also challenged.
Loss and Risk in Leaving
Increasingly there was recognition that women have to evaluate many risks, such as homelessness, poverty, isolation, community disapproval, and legal battles, in addition to the risk of battering (Arnold & Ake, 2013, p. 564; Davies, Lyons, & Monti-Catania, 1998; Thomas, Goodman, & Putnins, 2015). From the start, residents of Transition House demonstrated by their choices that factors other than abuse influenced their decisions. Most dramatically, some women returned to their abusive partners, an outcome the founding group had not anticipated: “It had not occurred to us that women would go back.”
Experience and research have yielded a more nuanced understanding of why people remain in or return to intimate relationships, even when there is abuse, and of the losses involved for women and their children who seek safety by leaving their homes and relationships (Thomas et al., 2015). One former resident, who stayed at Transition House in 1980 with her two small children, expressed some of that sense of loss: The other person is not always bad. My husband had some good and endearing qualities. When you leave, you lose everything. I still miss some of the things I left behind, things my parents gave me when I was a child. I had missed my teddy bear, but I knew it was gone, because the kids saw him destroy it. I remember her saying, ‘I earned this. I earned this. I worked so hard.’ And it is no more or less painful than people saying, ‘But I need to see my mom,’ or ‘I miss my abuser. I’m not going back, but I just miss my abuser.’ That was one of the moments when it re-broke my heart all over again. Because this, for everyone, is fresh. She couldn’t go to her prom or her graduation. It was many years ago. I think she left the shelter.
The Need of Staff for Self-Care
The pioneers at Transition House apparently had no consciousness of the toll that their work and their “tyrannical work ethic,” as one of them put it, took. In retrospect, however, many of them acknowledged the need for a period of recovery and some kind of spiritual sustenance once leaving Transition House. “Burn out,” “compassion fatigue,” and “secondary trauma” were not in the 1970s vocabulary. They began getting serious attention in the literature only in the 1990s. Through the 1980s and 1990s, as the energy of the pioneer group and the sustaining force of the Women’s Movement waned, the ability of Transition House to care for its staff and volunteers was not consistent. On the one hand, the collective gave a great sense of belonging and power to its members, about which many interviewees spoke. “We were accountable to each other. I have never had that work experience since.” “I credit T House with formation of my understanding of what women can do.” “Because of the ownership people had in the structure and idea, all carried the vision into their lives and into the community.” At the same time, there was, until the last 10 years, little explicit attention to the personal/emotional costs of their work. One staff member said that as recently as 2008, “Everyone felt overworked and had no time for anything else.” That has changed.
Gradual Openness to Psychological Thinking
By the 1990s, the resistance to psychological thinking was waning, due partly to changes in the field of psychology, themselves a result of the Women’s Movement, and partly to the increasingly complex needs of the women who came to Transition House. In the mid-1970s, “feminist mental health” was an oxymoron. The mental health professions generally saw those who were beaten by their partners as having psychological issues that contributed to, if they did not cause, the abuse (e.g., Lion, 1977; Star, Clark, Goetz & O’Malia, 1979). By the 1980s, one success of the Women’s Movement was the beginning of new perspectives in the mental health professions (e.g., Miller, 1987/1976). In the early 1990s, one of the new feminist psychologists developed a trauma and resilience analysis of survivors of domestic violence (Herman, 1992). This perspective created the possibility of a less adversarial stance toward psychological thinking about survivors.
For two decades, Transition House was committed to a model of peer help. Into the 1990s, the only formalized qualifications for a paid job at Transition House were embracing diversity and not having a mental health degree. That position softened in 1992, when staff members were confounded by some resident behaviors (suicidal threats and a woman who sometimes experienced herself as a child) and also more open to psychological thinking because of the new feminist resources in mental health. Wary of slipping into a psychological analysis of battering, the staff found a compromise. Through the 1990s, a social worker volunteered as a consultant to the staff, not directly interacting with residents (and not paid). By the late 1990s, the shelter program included weekly “case review” and “service planning” meetings. The children’s program included “therapeutic individual and group experiences” for children (Braverman, 1997). Today, the staff has regular “clinical supervision,” a term the founders would have roundly rejected, a few of the paid staff are social workers, and many of the trainees are students of social work. “Trauma-informed responses” are considered essential skills.
A More Complex Analysis
Transition House was a product of Second Wave Feminism, part of the new attention to, and creation of domestic violence as a social issue. Experience with survivors, research on domestic violence, and the evolution of feminist thinking in psychology brought attention and resources to broadening areas of residents’ experience (and also of staff experience) not part of the original analysis. Ending domestic violence, for each woman and for society, turned out to be more complicated than was originally assumed.
Many of the founding group and early volunteers identified as lesbian and were soon aware of battering in lesbian relationships. To one person active in the 1980s, lesbian battering undermined the whole feminist analysis. Nationally, the developing academic research on intimate partner violence threw into question its gendered nature (Gelles, 1987/1974; Gilfus, Trabold, O’Brien, & Fleck-Henderson, 2010; Straus, Gelles, & Steinmetz, 1981) and was followed by the 2006 clarification of Federal law that access to domestic violence shelters cannot be denied to men fleeing abuse (U.S. Government Publishing Office, 2006). The terminology, itself, was contested. “Wife abuse” and “battering” yielded to “domestic violence.” “Family violence,” “couple violence,” or (today) the gender-neutral “intimate partner violence” was favored at different times and from different perspectives.
The original analysis was challenged also by the persistence of domestic violence in the face of women’s increased economic power over the decades since the 1960s. One early volunteer said: “In some ways we had a simplistic analysis when we started.” She tellingly added: “Maybe that helped.” A number of volunteers and staff from the earlier decades said, in varied ways, “We expected the problem would be eradicated by now.”
Periods of Discontinuous Organizational Change
By the mid-1990s, Transition House was struggling with financial problems, structural problems with the house, and staff conflicts. The long-term volunteers who provided leadership for the collective were deeply dedicated to the organization and its proud political history and somewhat overwhelmed.
Collective governance was a key founding principle. Loyalty to that principle and its feminist grounding sustained and energized the agency but also inhibited its ability to adapt to a changed environment. Notes from a staff/board meeting in January 1997 are full of comments about the frustration people felt. Most often expressed was concern about the governance: “Too many people deciding every issue;” “without defined accountability at T House things often fall through the cracks;” “there are not clear guidelines as to who makes decisions and how these decisions should be carried out.”
The collective process was where consciousness raising, movement building, and running the shelter came together, and Transition House was identified with all those purposes and with that process. Letting go of the collective may have signified letting go of the agency’s movement identity. To say it was not easy to let go of the collective understates the case. Organizational problems forced the decision. In 1996, a board of directors was created. From 1996 to 1998, the new board, composed primarily of longtime volunteers, worked tirelessly to keep the organization viable in spite of daunting financial and personnel challenges. In 1998, they hired the first executive director. In the face of her own doubts and others’ sadness about ending, the collective, the outgoing board president wrote: Step back and see what we have done: we have saved this organization from fiscal ruin, taken steps to make it a place where people can live and work with dignity again, and most importantly, we have kept the doors to T House open to the women whose lives depend on it. This is not a small, careless thing. This is good work (Simenas, 1998).
After each executive director left, the board had another discussion about the roles of board and staff and about the agency’s basic principles. Was it still feminist, grassroots, or empowerment focused? What did those terms mean in the 2000s? A 2005 survey of volunteers at Transition House reported their feeling that, “We are a symbol for the feminist, grassroots community (Volunteer Roundtable Notes, February 16, 2005).” Transition House’s very success as a pioneering feminist agency made it extremely difficult to explicitly abandon its founding principles.
Transition House has emerged from this period of self-doubt and inconsistent leadership in the years since 2012. One member of the board, not herself a former volunteer, gradually became, as she put it “the de-facto face of Transition House.” She began having conversations with a staff that was already quite strong but overworked, anxious about the organization, and insufficiently supported. With her leadership, the staff decided on a new structure to support their work with the shelter and transitional housing. Over the next few years (with her official leadership), the board stabilized the organization’s finances, the shelter was rehabilitated, the board and staff agreed on directing the agency’s attention outward into the community, and new relationships in the community were nurtured. The period since 2012 is the first since the earliest years when apparently governance is not a contentious issue.
Transition House’s new chapter is built on the recognition that most survivors of domestic violence are living in the community—not only because there is rarely available shelter but also because they prefer it. Relationships in the community are also seen as key to prevention.
With new confidence in and support from Transition House, a Cambridge city councilor led an effort in 2011 to reinvigorate citywide efforts to end domestic violence. That effort culminated in the city’s commitment to support a paid director of a Domestic and Gender-Based Violence Prevention Initiative. That city government employee, hired in 2014, works closely with Transition House as well as other parts of the city in doing the community work.
An appeal for donations in June 2016 begins: As Transition House marks 40 years of service, we continue to learn from past experience so we can create new strategies to end domestic violence. We understand the complicated cultural, political and economic landscape around us and how the very low income survivors of violence we serve are marginalized. Our dynamic Community Support Partnership is a team of organizers and social workers who work in tandem with nonprofit and municipal partners…to provide support to our neighbors before violence escalates and before they become homeless.
Staff morale oddly echoes that of the early collective, and the sense of embarking on something new and exciting also feels reminiscent of the earlier agency. Many staff members expressed a sense of collective responsibility to each other and to the agency. One respondent said, “Everyone does everything. You don’t feel a sense of hierarchy.” Another noted, “The teamwork, I don’t even know how to describe it. We are like a big web.” And from a recent hire on the community support team: “The team, the whole organization is so collaborative, so open. You…can challenge things. Your voice is valued.” While not identified with a Movement, the agency has a definite sense of movement into new territory. Ending domestic violence, the director says, “…is our role, but not our role alone. We act on our mission in a whole different way.” There are also notable areas of contrast. Most notable is the very close relationship with state actors. In the early years, the attitude of the agency to the city was one of mistrust; city officials were not even to know where the shelter was. Transition House today is a collaborator with the city’s government and nonprofit establishment, while it also sees itself as working to change those systems.
Conclusion
The 1970s were the pioneering years of movement building; the 1980s saw continued movement building, specifically around prevention, but also increasing tension between the needs of running the shelter and commitment to collective nonhierarchical governance. Through that decade, those coming to Transition House had increasingly urgent needs beyond the need to flee violence, as political and economic trends made affordable housing and adequate income less available to those wanting to move beyond shelter. The 1990s were characterized by turmoil, over governance, and by serious financial and personnel difficulties. Transition House continued to struggle with its sense of identity, purpose, and structure into the 2000s. Today, it appears to exist on a new footing, continuous in its purpose to shelter survivors and work to end domestic violence, but without its original principles of peer-help and nonhierarchical governance, and without emergency shelter as its main service.
Transition House began as a radical organization identified with a movement for social change while also providing services for those fleeing abuse. The movement’s success led to public funding for the services, but Transition House did not give up its Movement identity. For decades, Transition House resisted pressure to adopt a traditional governing structure and to hire mental health professionals, maintaining the collective and informal relations among volunteers, residents, and staff. As the political and economic context made the work of Transition House increasingly challenging, that loyalty to its founding principles may have contributed to the difficulties it finally faced in the mid-1990s. Transition House never wavered in its commitment to the women it serves. Ultimately, it lost its identification with a political movement, which had, itself, moved on. Today, it works for social change from within the mainstream of city departments and nonprofit agencies.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.