Hotline to End Rape & Abuse
Nancy was the heart of our group, she’d been through it all and lived to tell it. A discerning eye could catch the facial reconstruction that Sheila had from years of domestic violence. Betty was very proper from the good side of town, puffing on skinny brown MORE cigarettes, yet her heart and work ethic were extraordinary.
We had black and Latina caucuses within our volunteer base, a network of places to shelter women including an apartment at the Howard Street YWCA and a 24-hour hotline to take calls. While many of my friends worked in the more established shelters in Boston—Transition House, Elizabeth Stone House and Rosie’s Place, ours was grassroots and deeply rooted in Springfield, quite apart from the burgeoning women’s movement.
My first job out of college was a dream feminist assignment—to organize rape crisis/battered women’s services through the Springfield YWCA
We taught self-defense classes, trained in martial arts and participated in Take Back the Night marches. I was a part of establishing the first Statewide Coalition of Battered Women Service Groups as well as the National Domestic Violence Coalition.
Fundraising was hard, burnout ever present, but these four years were formative in my community organizing and feminist development.
The CETA pay was low, the stress high, but it was so inspiring to work with women of all races and classes in a time of record violence against women in this working-class town.
EG performing a kata with the Springfield Women’s Martial Arts School, established by Wendy Dragonfire at the first National Women’s Martial Arts Training in Detroit, 1977.