Battered Women's Refuge as Social Symbolic Space

Patriarchal cultures have generated a vast folk lore narrating the quandaries of damsels in distress, overtaken by merciless villains. Such villains are a necessary storytelling convention under patriarchy, for they set in bold relief the beneficence and redemptive powers of the good male protector. For every Christ there is a Satan (or its secular equivalent), with each representing one side of the Law of the Father. The contest between these two poles of masculine authority—between protective authority and malevolent control—establish the coordinates of many a handmaiden's universe. While her naive and trusting nature may undermine her capacity to distinguish illusory and genuine guardians of her virtue, the female protagonist finds that her fate ultimately depends on her ability to discern the difference.

The battered women's movement that emerged in the 1970s intervened in this Gothic romance, displacing man the redeemer with the power of sisterhood. Shelters and crisis facilities arose, as women began to collectively name and resist male violence. Reworking psychological portraits of abused women, feminists showed how the cycle of violence was more than a series of individual repetitions of past trauma. The working through of gendered trauma required collective forms of reparation, and a politically realized vision of subjectivity. Further, the movement demonstrated that the male protectors and healers women had traditionally relied upon—the “good patriarchs” in the world of the oedipal fathers—only loosened the chains that bound her to her state of dependency. To break out of this pernicious cycle, women needed to find sanctuary or “transitional spaces” run by and for women. In psychoanalytic terms, women needed to “return” to the mother. Economic independence and legal remedies were a necessary foundation for self-development. But on the deepest emotional level, the holding, containing presence of women was essential for breaking the spell of the Gothic romanc