Author: Lotte Houwink ten Cate, Department of History, Columbia University - Personal Website, Academia.edu

Abstract: »Beginning in 1970, radical feminists on both sides of the Atlantic constructed a new infrastructure of wrongs including ‘battery’, ‘crimes against women,’ ‘wife rape’ and ‘femicide’ – that centred around an intensified notion of bodily autonomy. By the late 1980s, their liberal counterparts had launched an extraordinarily successful campaign against male violence that led to legislative reforms, EU and UN resolutions, and embedded itself in the interstices of state-funded social provision in European capitals. Based on archival research, feminist and legal theory and interviews with key protagonists, this paper resurrects an alternative genealogy of feminist thought that historicises what we now define as ‘gender-based violence,’ its causes and effects, and the potential ways out as they were first imagined, and then translated into policy and law. With a focus on refuge activism in the Netherlands and its transnational history, I locate the origins of this vocabulary not in canonical theory, but in the international network of European shelters, which housed the nucleus of the 1970s and 1980s radical feminist movement against male violence. I discuss these first shelters as ideas to live in.« (Source: Global Intellectual History)

Wikipedia: Feminism: Radical feminism | Sex and the law: Gender-related violence