Gendering Value Change: Domestic Violence and Feminism in 1970s West Berlin*

Abstract

Abstract Feminist domestic violence activists in 1970s West Berlin sought to create a community of women helping women. This was key to feminist work in challenging patriarchal citizenship norms and male violence against women. Tracing the evolution of feminist domestic violence activism in West Berlin, this article argues that feminist ideals and critiques were deradicalized as they were taken up in political and public discourse. Rather than being a political project of creating feminist community or challenging gendered concepts of citizenship, domestic violence activism was entrenched as a women’s issue that women were responsible for addressing. Indeed, examining official public and media support for domestic violence projects exposes how the state leant on women as the drivers of gender equality, in ways that were often unpaid and unacknowledged. Far from contesting patriarchy, popular support for domestic violence initiatives went hand-in-hand with a reinscription of a deeply rooted sexual-moral order that entwined liberal development in Germany with paternal and patriarchal authority since the nineteenth century. In making this argument, this article demonstrates that value change was both limited and functioned within normative boundaries. What change did occur was contingent on the labour of women and feminists, whose activism challenged the power structures and norms that left women vulnerable to abuse. Moreover, in the context of the global economic downturn of the 1970s, grassroots feminist activism held even more importance as it offered West Germany a cheap solution to a systemic issue that could no longer be ignored.