Women in Transition: a Study of Vancouver
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WOMEN IN TRANSITION: A STUDY OF VANCOUVER TRANSITION HOUSE AS AGENT OF CHANGE JILLIAN BOTHAM RIDINGTON A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in SOCIOLOGY We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA October, 1977 (T) Jillian Botham Ridington, 1977 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by his representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of Soc iology The University of British Columbia 2075 Wesbrook Place Vancouver, Canada V6T 1W5 Date October 5, 1977 ABSTRACT This thesis examines the origins and function of Vancouver Transition House as an agent of role change and of social change. It is based on observations made during a three-year period as a member of the Transition House staff collective, on formal and informal interviews with the founders, staff, and residents of the house, and on Stephenson's, Garden's, and Freeman's studies of the new feminist movement. The work commences with a discussion of the growth of the women's move• ment in Vancouver to a stage where the need for social action was understood to be necessary. The effort of the society formed to found the house is then delineated. It is noted that involvement with that group created changes in self-concept and inter-personal relationships similar to those described by Stephenson as occurring in the founders of the original Vancouver women's groups (Stephenson, 1975). The operation of the house and the role of the staff are detailed. There follows an analysis of the transition process undergone by residents, focussing on the importance of a milieu controlled and inhabited exclusively by women in facilitating this process. It is noted that changes in self-concept and in interpersonal relationships, again similar to those experienced by women in• volved in feminist groups, do occur, but that these may not be sustained after the period of residency without changes in the social context. Recommendations for change in the legal and social systems necessary to sustain individual chang accorded to by a group of transition house workers from refuges throughout North America, are examined. The author concludes that such recommendations demand extended social change, and notes the necessity of recognition of the value of work done by women, and of equality of responsibility in the domestic and public spheres. Until these conditions prevail, women's powereto control institutions and bring about fundamental social change will be limited. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE i INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER I: WOMEN'S LIBERATION IN CANADA AND VANCOUVER 3 A. THE CANADIAN BEGINNINGS 3 B. THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT IN VANCOUVER 4 i) The Women's Caucus 4 ii) The U.B.C. Group 7 iii) Community Involvement of the Women's Caucus 11 iv) Involvement of the U.B.C. Group 13 C. VOICE OF WOMEN 16 D. THE STATUS OF WOMEN 20 SUMMARY 23 CHAPTER II: THE BEGINNINGS OF TRANSITION HOUSE 24 A. WOMEN'S PLACE 25 B. WIFE BATTERING AS A FEMINIST ISSUE 29 C. THE BEGINNINGS OF TRANSITION HOUSE 32' CHAPTER III: TRANSITION HOUSE IN OPERATION 38 A. THE HOUSE 39 B. THE STAFF 42 C. THE WORK OF A "TRANSITION HOUSE WORKER" 49 D. • .STAFF ORGANIZATION AND RELATIONSHIPS 53 CHAPTER IV: RESIDENTS AND THE TRANSITION PROCESS 56 CHAPTER V: SOME CASE HISTORIES 79 iv CHAPTER VI: THE FUTURE: TRANSITION HOUSE AND THE SOCIAL CONTEXT 87 CHAPTER VII: IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS / 118 CONCLUSIONS 128 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Without the following women, this thesis could not have existed, and I gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to them all; my mother, Ida Marjorie Botham, who died as it began, but inspired in me a desire to understand the world around me; Val MacDermot, who gave me both infor• mation and inspiration; Bev Crabtree, who patiently undid and redid all my mistakes and made a jumble of papers into a thesis; and all the women of Transition House - staff, founders, and residents, who have made transition house a home for all of us who have needed it. Each individual woman gaining self-respect, yes, power, over her own body and soul first, then within her family, on her block, in her state, and so on out from the centre,' overlapping with similar changes other women are experiencing. The circles rippling more widely as they go. This is a revolution in consciousness, rising expectations, and the actions which reflect that organic process. Robin Morgan, "Rights of Passage Ms. 1975, Vol. IV, #5: 77 PREFACE As Maren Lockwood Carden noted, after finishing her research on the feminist movement, Active social movements in general cannot be studied by conventional social-scientific methods. The women's movement in particular is too fluid and its members too hostile to the impersonal approaches of highly quantitative sociology, which they feel loses sight of the total picture. (Carden, 1974, 8) Dorothy Smith, in "Women's Perspective: A Radical Critique of Sociology", has made the same point, while discussing a broader context of socio• logical inquiry, The theories, concepts and methods of our discipline claim to account for, or to be capable of accounting for and analysing the same world as that which we experience directly... the sociologist as an actual person in an actual concrete setting has been cancelled in the procedures which objectify and separate him from his knowledge. Thus the linkage which points back to its condition is lacking. (Smith, 1975a,10) To avoid the problems of removing myself from the experience and the understandings of those who undergo the process I have studied, my method has been that of a very active participant observer. The problem I am attempting to understand and analyze is not one from which I am removed either physically or emotionally. Nor is it of only theoretical interest to me. It is based on three years' work at Vancouver Transition House, work done not as a sociologist but as a member of a feminist collective which staffs the house. I began to work at Transition House only weeks after the dissolution of a relationship which has been physically and psychologically oppressive to me. Despite a good edu• cation, and a proven ability to hold responsible positions, I had remained in a destructive relationship for almost two decades. Once free of it, I attempted to understand my inability to extricate myself from the relationship for such a long period, and the factors which had finally made that possible. Coming to that understanding, concurrently with helping other women to extricate themselves from damaging relation• ships, has led me to an awareness of the degree to which the control of women's lives is denied to them. As Smith notes, (1975b, 9) "sociologists tend to use an agentic approach", which assumes that "a human being has the power to initiate change" and in which "the power to act and coordinate in a planned and rational manner and to exercise control over conditions and means are taken for granted". But it is necessary to the functioning of corporate capitalism that women be subjected to men, their needs subordinated to the needs of men, and that fact makes women less able to exercise control over their acts. In an earlier paper, Smith noted that women are depend• ent not on men, but on men's source of employment (Smith, 1973, 18). Though this varies somewhat with class, since women married to middle class men are assigned to that place, the home, which is external to the managerial structure and external therefore to that place where the decisions which have consequences for the conditions of their existences are made. (Ibid, 13) and women married to working class men are dependent on men whose employ• ment, in turn, is dependent on governments and management. "The success of her labours is always conditional upon external contingencies which originate in the world of "them" and over which she has no control other that that which she exercises over her husband." (ibid, 19) Few women, even those who are well-educated, unmarried, and "middle-class" in their own right are involved in government and management, and therefore able to directly influence the making of the decisions which effect "the con• ditions of their existences". In our society, as Smith notes in "Ideological Structures and How Women are Excluded", the exclusion of women from actively making and creating the forms in which social relations are thought and spoken of has not in general had to he violently suppressed. The ordinary socially organized process of socialization, edu• cation, work and communication perform more routine, gener• alized and effective practise. (Smith, 1976, 9) Through such practise, women have not only been excluded from "ideological structures" but have come to accept such exclusion as norma• tive. Sociology, as part of the educational and communication network which functions as part of that practise, has reflected the system which it has undertaken to analyse. It has been authored mainly by middle-class males. It has become an instrument for understanding organizations as they are assumed to be by those who govern them, and not as they.are experienced by those who work in them: The relevances and perspectives of the discourse are built upon these foundations which in locating sociology in the ruling apparatus of corporate capitalism also provides for the silences of those who become its objects.