[dropcap]I[/dropcap] did an interview with Dean Esmay recently and while we were working together and I spent time looking at the web site A Voice for Men. As I read, I became more and more convinced that I had found my place. After talking at length with Paul Elam, I agreed that I will be able to write and to join in with the many contributors and readers as an advisor and editor on this site. AVfM is an inclusive site and after all the hate filled rhetoric I have endured for so many years I feel as if I am coming home.
It is now two thousand and thirteen. Forty-two years ago I opened the first shelter/refuge in the world in a tiny, derelict house in the streets of Chiswick, West London. In those years I had a vision about a woman’s movement that would work for all women in harmony with men.
There were serious issues that needed changing in my experience. I could not get a mortgage as a woman without my husband or other male figures co-signing. When I wished to get married I needed to get proof for my doctor of my intentions before he could give me contraception.
Abortions were illegal and women were driven into the hands of illegal abortionists or other, even more desperate measures. Most of the women I knew in my area and some men called themselves “equity feminists” but I was disillusioned very early on when I attended the “collectives,” as their conferences were called.
What I saw devastated my dream.
Those of us on the floor were told that we were to be formed into groups and to choose our names and then to meet in our houses every week. We were to call ourselves “sisters” or “comrades.” I was instantly suspicious because I was born in China and my parents were supporters and friends with Chiang Kai-shek. This was at a time when Mao began his long march across China.
Later on in 1949 my father, who was in the Consular Services, was posted back to Tien Sien (now called Tianjin) and both my parents were captured by the communists and put under house arrest. I was in boarding school with my twin sister for the three years they were captured. We heard very little news and for a time we thought they were dead.
When my mother was allowed out with my brother she told us all about the atrocities, the starvation killing millions of people across China that were taking place. In those big collectives we heard the Maoist women giving mind blowing accounts of liberation for women under this happy regime and then the counter arguments about the joys of Russian communism.
Pretty early on I realized that this movement had nothing to do with men and women working together for equality, but all to do with a schism between the left wing men and women. The women decided to move the goal posts from capitalism as the enemy and institute “patriarchy” – men – as the enemy to all women and children. The schism spread and became a gulf between all men and women.
That is when the women who were on the platform and were leading this movement (though they claimed this new movement was leaderless), identified their chief enemy was the structure of the patriarchal family. The new family would now be the mothers and their children. Fathers were now to be disenfranchised. Women, as in Russia and China, would become units of production and their children would be sent to twenty four hour nurseries. The communist doctrine has always been to subvert the women first and then everything else would follow.
This is the history of the so called women’s movement. I left and with a small group of women opened a community house that was open to all women and their children and men were welcome by invitation. Very quickly the first women who was bleeding and battered came in to ask for help. Others followed her, but before long we were no longer a community house and our supporters melted away because instead of grateful battered women coming through our doors several of the women were as violent as the men they left and violent to their children.
Very quickly I realized there were two different problems. Women who were innocent victims of their partner’s violence certainly needed refuge but with support could very quickly get on with their lives. But the women who were victims of violence from their dysfunctional childhood experiences, and who had become perpetrators of violence, needed long term therapy.
I knew as soon as we began to receive press attention and donations, the feminist movement would move in. Highly organized, but bereft of attention or funding because they were far too radical, they needed a cause that generated funding. The plight of battered women and the feminist stance that all men were oppressors merged to become their mantra: All women were victims of all men’s violence.
None of this made any allowance for men or children who were the victims of violence by women, or for female perpetrators that also demanded our attention.
Very quickly they began to set up shelters in America under the banner of that twisted mantra. I was very alarmed and desperate to get anyone to listen to me, which became a source of ridicule. Men laughed at the feminist movement in the early days and when I tried to warn them they said I was paranoid.
Now I believe we are on the cusp of change. Sufficient men and women have realized that this billion dollar industry is a threat, not just to the family that has all but disintegrated, but also to the fabric of our society.
What most people do not recognize is that the actual refuges do not benefit from the money poured into this movement. Most of the money that is completely unaccountable goes into the huge edifice that is publicly touted to concern itself with the role of women.
Agencies across the world, the UN as an example, have been infiltrated with the false new religion and gladly embraced by the women who have managed to create a lucrative women only zone. No men can work in the refuges, no men can sit on any board and no small boys over nine to twelve years old can enter the refuges.
And no men and children who are victimized by domestic violence can get any help.
The movement to this day remains sealed off to the rest of the world. So many of you who access this web site have probably faced the same hostility to any questioning and have been branded as I have, as “women haters.”
I have been picketed and threatened, others have been threatened with bomb scares, not just because we disagree with the politics of this movement but because we threaten the future of agencies like VAWA that pour millions of dollars into the feminist pockets who can then continue with their promised destruction of our precious democracy.
Democracy is a fragile institution, depending as it does on the will of the people to uphold it. We have been fooled far too long and in writing this manifesto I wish to join you on this web site. I am begging you to become ambassadors for family life and the inclusion of men back into the lives of their families. I say this knowing that if we do not return men to their rightful status as human beings worthy of equal treatment under the law, we will get nowhere.
I ask that we stand together, not divided by gender but united in recognizing that domestic violence is not and never has been a gender issue. Violence in the family is generational and if we ignore the damage done to children marinated in violence we throw away our children’s lives and condemn them to repeat the patterns of their violent parents.
This is the beginning of a New Year. I hope for all of us a recognition that the gloves must come up and action taken. I see our first demand has to be a transparent look at the international funding of this evil empire and thereafter a total dismantling of the big lie.
I am aware that for many the damage has already been done, but all of us have to look to the future and I believe this movement instead of being scattered in small enclaves on the web has to come together so that men and women can speak in one voice. We are a movement of love and inclusion and the future of the family is far too fragile to continue to stand aside and watch it dismantled.
[typography font=”Just Another Hand” size=”34″ size_format=”px”]Erin[/typography]
