Lilith 16: 2007

RESPONSE: A Feminist History of Violence: History as a Weapon of Liberation?

Lee-Ann Monk

Thirteen years ago, an earlier incarnation of the Lilith collective held a conference on the theme ‘The Violence of Institutions’, which explored the many violent effects produced by ‘institutions’, broadly defined. Among the articles published on this theme in the resulting volume of Lilith was my first article.1 At the time I was researching the social and cultural history of nineteenth-century asylum work and workers for my PhD. It was research that very quickly confronted me with considerable evidence of violence and abuse, meted out to patients by those charged with their care. In that first article, I sought to explore the meanings of the violence nineteenth-century women asylum warders inflicted on their female patients. The focus, then, was on women, not as victims of violence, but as its perpetrators. Since then I have continued to puzzle over the use of force and violence in institutions for people with mental illness and intellectual disability. It is from this perspective that my interest in the history of violence, and my response to this symposium, comes.

That a new Lilith collective returned to questions of gender and violence a little over a decade after that conference suggests that violence continues to be a crucial issue for feminists. Angela Woollacott’s keynote address powerfully articulated why this should be so, recounting some of the myriad ways in which violence has been ‘integral’ to men’s past and present domination of women, from the abuse many women experience in their intimate relationships to the effects of military conflicts and their aftermath, in which women are frequently raped, murdered or forced into prostitution and sexual slavery. ‘Feminist theory and history’, she argues, ‘allow us to recognise the pervasiveness, and systematic nature, of this violence against women’.

Clearly, a feminist history of violence must address the urgent issue of the gendered violence many women continue to experience in their daily lives. In this context, an affirmative answer to the question posed by the symposium’s title, a question concerned with the relationship between feminist scholarship and activism, seems most clear-cut. Speakers showed that subjecting seemingly positive social policies, such as the recent federal government campaign against domestic violence, to feminist analysis and historical contextualisation can reveal the ways in which they actually reinforce unequal gender relations (in this instance perhaps resulting in ‘more people’ wrongly believing ‘that women are as likely as men to be perpetrators of domestic violence than did so a decade ago’, as Angela reported in her address). Similarly, critical historical reflection on feminist activism, such as that against rape, may open new paths to action in the struggle to end sexual and other violence against women, particularly where that activism has seemingly reached an impasse.

When I first began researching women asylum warders’ use of force against their patients, I found it relatively easy to find other examples of women’s violence, both historical and contemporary, but much more difficult to find research on violent women; it was a subject feminists seemingly wrote little about. When researchers did tackle the question of women’s violence, their explanations tended to depict the perpetrators in stereotypical ways that denied their agency and status as ‘responsible moral agents’. Violent women, it seemed, ‘did not really know what they were doing’.2 The inclusion at this symposium of a session on the ‘violent feminine’ suggests that women’s violence is now seen as an issue with which a feminist history of violence should be concerned. As Angela pointed out in her keynote address, women have both resisted and ‘appropriated violence’, citing women’s resort to violence and terror in the cause of the Indian anti-colonist nationalist movement as one example. It was surprising to hear though, in a paper on German ‘terrorist’ Ulrike Marie Meinhof, that such women continue to be represented in stereotypical ways which, by denying their agency, fail to fully explain their motivations and actions. Part of the task of a feminist history of violence must be to analyse women’s violence in a clear-eyed way, seeking to recognise them, as the speaker put it, ‘as producers of meaning rather than merely produced’.

If a feminist history of violence is to be a weapon of liberation, it must turn its sights not only on those women whose violence can perhaps be construed as somehow heroic, as violence in the cause of liberation movements might be, but also on those who were (and are) violent in more ‘mundane’ circumstances; for example women who, like nineteenth- century women asylum workers, abused those they were charged to care for. To confront the realisation that women have done such things is not easy, perhaps particularly for feminists. Feminist historians have, of course, met other versions of this dilemma; in an earlier issue of Lilith Barbara Brookes noted that ‘the enthusiasm of many first wave feminists for eugenics and farm colonies for the feeble-minded...unsettled historians who imagined that the champions of women’s rights would champion the rights of all, regardless of ability, race or class’.3 Similarly, women of colour have insisted that white women’s complicity with colonial projects must be recognised. A feminist history of violence must acknowledge and seek to explain such unsettling complexities.

The symposium suggested that recognition of such complexities ought also to influence the practice of feminist history. Drawing on feminist scholarship on gender and colonialism, speakers insisted that feminists be self-reflexive, aware of their position in and complicity with existing power structures, alert to the potential for appropriation of knowledge. Making these perspectives integral to research practice, they suggested, might prevent researchers doing violence to their subjects and inadvertently reproducing existing power relations, perhaps particularly salient concerns in writing a feminist history of violence, certainly necessary if history is to be part of the struggle against it. The evidence of this symposium suggests that feminists can, with care, use history as a weapon in the struggle against violence; that in fact, they are already doing so.

Lee-Ann Monk
La Trobe University

Endnotes

1. Lee-Ann Monk, ‘Working Like Mad: Nineteenth-Century Female Lunatic Asylum Attendants and Violence’, Lilith, no. 9 (Autumn 1996), 5–20.
2. Allison Morris and Ania Wilczynski, ‘Rocking the Cradle: Mothers who Kill their Children’, in Moving Targets: Women, Murder and Representation, ed. Helen Birch (London: Virago, 1993), 198–217; and Ann Jones, ‘Equal- opportunity Criminals?’, The Women’s Review of Books, vol. XI, no. 12 (September 1994), 12.
3. Barbara Brookes, ‘Reply to Jill Matthews: New Challenges for Feminist History’, Lilith, no. 12 (2003), 7.