How feminists tried to destroy the family

How feminists tried to destroy the family

Last updated at 23:19pm on 22nd January 2007

Erin Pizzey, founder of the battered wives' refuge, on how militant feminists - with the collusion of Labour's leading women - hijacked her cause and used it to try to demonise all men.

During 1970, I was a young housewife with a husband, two children, two dogs and a cat. We lived in Hammersmith, West London, and I didn't see much of my husband because he worked for TV's Nationwide. I was lonely and isolated, and longed for something other than the usual cooking, cleaning and housework to enter my life.
By the early Seventies, a new movement for women - demanding equality and rights - began to make headlines in the daily newspapers. Among the jargon, I read the words "solidarity" and "support". I passionately believed that women would no longer find themselves isolated from each other, and in the future could unite to change our society for the better.
Within a few days I had the address of a local group in Chiswick, and I was on my way to join the Women's Liberation Movement. I was asked to pay £3 and ten shillings as a joining fee, told to call other women "sisters" and that our meetings were to be called "collectives".
My fascination with this new movement lasted only a few months. At the huge "collectives", I heard shrill women preaching hatred of the family. They said the family was not a safe place for women and children. I was horrified at their virulence and violent tendencies. I stood on the same platforms trying to reason with the leading lights of this new organisation.