"We Recreate What We Know": Navigating the Institutionalization of a Feminist Anti-Violence Movement and Its Epistemic Stakes

Background

At the 1986 National Coalition Against Domestic Violence conference, Ellen Pence, co-creator of the Duluth Model, observed, “we recreate what we know.” She cautioned that by failing to act outside of the "consciousness of dominance", the battered women's movement was replicating structures of oppression it sought to dismantle. This comment alludes to a fundamental relationship between knowing and worldmaking. Indeed, the movement's transforming power was rooted in a new epistemic system generated when women came together to make sense of their experiences. It was through collective and embodied knowing practices that women validated their versions of reality and developed a structural analysis of the causes. And it was through acting together to keep more women and children safe that they created knowledge, skills, and models that professionals were unable to offer.

This new epistemic system was built on horizontal and reciprocal relations among women, which redefined the link between lived experiences, knowledge, and action. However, beginning in the late 1970s, the movement entered its institutionalization phase that modified these relations. Professionalization reestablished the "helper/helped" binary, while hierarchical organizational structures distanced decision-making from women’s lived experiences. These processes unavoidably threatened the sustainable operation of the epistemic system. This study asks: How did activists and participants of the movement identify and navigate these shifts from the late 1970s through the 2000s? And what were the epistemic stakes of these moves?

Method

To answer these questions, this project examines movement-based periodicals such as Aegis: Magazine on Ending Violence Against Women (1978–1987) and organizational records from local and national coalitions against domestic violence. These are supplemented by the personal papers of leading activists and theorists, including Deb Friedman, Ellen Pence, Barbara Hart, Beth Richie, and Susan Schechter.

Results

A preliminary examination of Aegis reveals that activists and participants were acutely aware of how institutionalization reshaped relationships both among women at different stages of their journeys within the movement and between anti-violence organizations and institutions of established power. Without explicitly naming epistemic issues, they nevertheless actively worked to consolidate and systematize the knowledge grown from grassroots organizing and mutual aid efforts. For example, they developed a support group curriculum that cultivated a self-help ethos, shared leadership, survivor agency, and collective advocacy.

Implications

This study pushes social work to recognize its debt to the epistemic labor of the anti-violence movement and to reflect on its role in the renewal of liberatory knowledge. In doing so, this project presents an opportunity for an overhaul of social work epistemologies, questioning the field’s reluctance to trust those it seeks to help as knowers who can generate transformative knowledge when brought together in reciprocal spaces.

Furthermore, this work invites a re-evaluation of the anti-violence movement by its achievement in challenging dominant epistemic systems. This revisit is also necessary to interrogate the internal and external forces that have hindered the continuation of the movement’s epistemic and political work.