"Better than being on the streets": Oregon, Idaho, and the battered women's movement

Samantha Edgerton

This thesis is centered on interpersonal violence (IPV) and the battered women's shelter movement in Oregon and Idaho during the period 1975 through 1994. The primary goals of the movement included providing shelter and advocacy for women fleeing abusive relationships, acknowledging women's right to bodily autonomy as well as control over the way they lived their lives, and to end violence against women in their homes. The goal of this project is to explain how the battered women's movement transformed public consciousness about IPV in the Pacific Northwest, specifically by focusing on select communities in the states of Oregon and Idaho. I seek to provide a historical analysis of the people and institutions that created shelters, pursued legislation criminalizing IPV, and changed public perception of survivors of IPV. This conceptual framework provides new ways of understanding a problem and identifying strategies to improve future policy outcomes. It also highlights trends or issues that have not previously been explored in depth and contributes ideas for resolution of longstanding, historical problems such as IPV. In addition to exploring the establishment of the battered women's movement in Oregon and Idaho, I argue that the political backlash that began nationally in the early 1980s against late twentieth century feminisms affected the battered women's movement in Oregon and Idaho in a similar way. This study reveals how the grassroots movements in both states evolved into social service institutions that sought to remove the discussion of IPV from a structural, social analysis of the dynamics of interests and power to one focused on individual behaviors. I also argue that the professionalization of IPV services removed the opportunity for women to seek greater economic freedom because the same services meant to assist women out of violent relationships became enmeshed with the capitalist structure that relied on keeping systems of power within the family in place. By analyzing the regional dimensions of IPV in the 1970s and 1980s, I seek to answer if there were regional factors in Oregon and Idaho that accelerated, or decelerated rates of violence as well as address the urban/rural dimensions of the problem.

"Better than being on the streets": Oregon, Idaho, and the battered women's movement

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