Women’s Aid: Professionalised Radicalism?

Abstract

My second case study, Women’s Aid, the UK’s national domestic violence charity, throws up a range of questions in many ways similar to those prompted by the preceding analysis of The Fawcett Society. In their present guises, the two organisations are in many respects similar. Like Fawcett, over the past few decades Women’s Aid has moved from a position of relative marginality to one in which it is now a respected, influential and media-friendly organisation playing a central role in the provision of services related to domestic violence. However, unlike Fawcett, Women’s Aid’s roots are in the autonomous strands of ‘second-wave’ feminism. It could therefore be read as having shifted from a radical, autonomous stance to a now more mainstream position, and might thus be seen as symptomatic of feminism’s increasing professionalisation and declining radicalism. This manifests itself through, for example, the organisation’s strong willingness to co-operate with both the local and national state, the casting of itself as an expert actor within the field of domestic violence service provision, its strong ethos of professionalism, its willingness to work with the corporate sector, and the centrality that the organisation affords to ‘multiagency’ work. Consequently, the history of Women’s Aid mirrors recurrent themes in existing literature on the trajectory of post-1970s feminism, in the UK and elsewhere.