Celebrating Activists During Women's History Month
Women’s History Month is a celebration of women’s contributions to history, culture, and society held annually in March. This years theme is: “Celebrating Women Who Tell Our Stories”, recognizing women, past and present, who have been active in all forms of media and storytelling.
These are just a few of the influential women who have made history as part of the anti-violence movement. Journey Center is grateful to these, and many other, activists for leading the way.
Jane Bolin
Jane Bolin was a trailblazing attorney who became the first African American female judge in the United States, serving on New York's Family Court for four decades.
Bolin was the first black woman to graduate from Yale Law School, the New York City Bar Association, and the New York City Law Department. In July, 1939 a 31-year-old Bolin made history again as the first African American female judge in the United States. Having already been assigned to what would be known as Family Court, Bolin was a thoughtful, conscientious force on the bench, confronting a range of issues on the domestic front and taking great care when it came to the plight of children.
Susan Brownmiller
Susan Brownmiller is an American feminist journalist, author, and activist best known for her 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. Brownmiller argues that rape had been previously defined by men rather than women, and that men use it as a means of perpetuating male dominance by keeping all women in a state of fear. The New York Public Library selected Against Our Will as one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century.
Brownmiller also participated in civil rights activism, joining CORE and SNCC during the sit-in movement in 1964. She first became involved in the Women's Liberation Movement in New York City in 1968, joining a consciousness raising group in the newly formed New York Radical Women organization. Brownmiller went on to coordinate a sit-in against Ladies' Home Journal in 1970, and began work on Against Our Will after a New York Radical Feminists speak-out on rape in 1971.
Combahee River Collective
A Black feminist lesbian socialist organization active in Boston from 1974 to 1980. The Collective argued that both the white feminist movement and the Civil Rights Movement were not addressing their particular needs as Black women and, more specifically, as Black lesbians.
The Collective are perhaps best known for developing the Combahee River Collective Statement, a key document in the history of contemporary Black feminism and the development of the concepts of identity politics as used among political organizers and social theorists, and for introducing the concept of interlocking systems of oppression, a concept of intersectionality.
Simone de beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir was a French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory.
De Beauvoir is considered one of the main founders of the modern feminist movement, mainly for her landmark text,Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex), 972 pages of analysis of women in a society that considers them unequal to men. Still controversial, de Beauvoir’s work was called pornography and forbidden by the Vatican. She said: “All oppression creates a state of war.”
Martha McWhirter
Martha White McWhirter was an American religious leader and advocate for women. In 1875 Martha opened the first shelter for refuges in Belton, Texas delivering services for battered wives thrives from the 1890s. She was the founder of religious Sanctificationist group that stands for: women should not be compelled to live without sanctified or an brutal husband and women's who followed her attempts to lives husband's who were alcoholic and batterers.
Deborah Parker
Deborah Parker, also known by her native name Tsi-Cy-Altsa, is an activist and indigenous leader in the United States. A member of the Tulalip Tribes of Washington, she served as its vice-chairwoman from 2012 to 2015 and is, as of July 2018, a board member for Our Revolution and the National Indigenous Women's Resource Center. She is also a co-founder of Indigenous Women Rise.
During the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013, Parker successfully campaigned both for the reauthorization and for the inclusion of provisions which gave tribal courts jurisdiction over violent crimes against women and families involving non–Native Americans on tribal lands.
Ellen Pence
Ellen Louise Pence was an American scholar and a social activist. She cofounded the Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project, an inter-agency collaboration model used today in all 50 states in the U.S. and over 17 countries. A leader in both the battered women's movement and the emerging field of institutional ethnography, she was the recipient of numerous awards including the Society for the Study of Social Problems Dorothy E. Smith Scholar Activist Award (2008) for significant contributions in a career of activist research.
Pence's focus was on legislative efforts, legal reform projects, shelter and advocacy program development, and training programs for judges, probation officers, law enforcement officers, and human service providers. Pence was the author of several educational manuals and curricula for classes for battered women, men who batter, and law enforcement officers. She coauthored two books: Educational Groups for Men Who Batter: The Duluth Model and Coordinated Community Response to Domestic Violence: Lessons from the Duluth Model.
Nicole PIttman
Nicole Pittman, the Executive Director of Just Beginnings, is committed to including the experiences of vulnerable children in conversations about interpersonal and sexual violence.
She is the nation’s foremost expert on the abusive practice of placing children on sex offender registries. Her 2013 Human Rights Watch report, “Raised on the Registry: The Irreparable Harm of Placing Children on Sex Offender Registries in the US,” draws upon interviews documenting the social and emotional toll of subjecting children to this practice, and is the first comprehensive examination of this issue.
Susan Schechter
Susan Schechter, was one of the most accomplished and respected leaders in the domestic violence prevention movement. Schechter's specialty was exploring the ways that domestic violence affects children. She devoted herself to building bridges between the domestic violence and child welfare fields, writing numerous highly regarded publications that offered guidance to the two communities.
Schechter co-authored Effective Intervention in Domestic Violence & Child Maltreatment Cases: Guidelines for Policy and Practice, popularly known as the "greenbook."Schechter wrote two books that are today considered virtual bibles in the domestic violence community. Women and Male Violence: The Visions and Struggles of the Battered Women's Movement was published in 1982 and helped shape the battered women's movement in this country. Schechter also co-authored When Love Goes Wrong, with Ann Jones in 1992.
Dr Lenore E Walker
Lenore Edna Walker Ed.D. is an American psychologist who founded the Domestic Violence Institute, documented the cycle of abuse and wrote The Battered Woman, for which she won the Distinguished Media Award in 1979.
She has testified as an expert witness in trials involving domestic abuse and had developed domestic violence training programs and drafted legislative reform. Walker interviewed 1,500 women who had been subject to domestic violence and found that there was a similar pattern of abuse, called the "cycle of abuse".
Journey Center is committed to serving all survivors on their unique path to safety and healing.
If you or someone you know is experiencing abuse, call or text Journey Center's 24-Hour Helpline at 216.391.4357 (HELP).