AlterNet: The Women's Room?

AlterNet

Transition House, New England's first battered women's shelter, has always been known for its cutting edge work helping women and children escape abusive homes.

Recently, however, the Boston-based 30-year-old organization has set a precedent that makes some feminist activists uncomfortable. The board has not only hired a man as the interim executive director, but they are doing a gender-neutral search for a permanent hire set to conclude August 30th.

About Women, a collective of psychologists and social workers who were instrumental in creating shelters (including Transition House itself) in the 1970s, see this as step in the wrong direction. They wrote the board of Transition House a letter last October protesting what they called a "flagrant violation" of the organization's founding principles to establish a space where "women could feel safe from male intrusion and could openly unburden themselves of the experiences of male violence they had undergone without fear of censure, criticism or inhibition by male presence."

This is just wrong. When you're dealing with women and children who have been terrorized by the man in their lives, sending them into a place run by a man defeats the idea of a safe house. This is a situation that needs to be a woman-only space to minimize trauma and let them heal. This is not an issue of fairness, it's an issue of oppression, of psychological need, and physical safety.