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A FIGHTER
IN EXILE
The
Sunday Times (London) August 17 1986
Erin
Pizzey, who pioneered women's refuges in the
Seventies, has retired to New Mexico. BRIAN DEER
found a changed woman
"UGH,"
gasps Erin Pizzey, as if the cup of hot English tea
she is drinking has been salted rather than sugared.
"The American woman is an appalling species. She
doesn't cook. She doesn't look after the children.
She is a revolting nuisance as far as I am
concerned."
Pizzey,
now 47 and more or less in exile, sprawls uneasily in
a low wooden armchair on the porch of her New Mexico
home, one leg propped up on a pine coffee table. The
scenery that surrounds her might have mellowed
another woman. Her house stands in an expensive
private estate 12 miles from Santa Fe, the state
capital and the south west's fastest growing tourist
resort. A few hundred yards beyond the fence that
marks out her land rise the first steep foothills of
the Rockies.
But
Pizzey appears unmoved by the beauty of the setting,
and even in the 80F heat is not practised at keeping
cool. "Women have all the power and men have
very little," she carries on. "Men die
young and spend most of their lives trying to pay the
mortgage. A woman sits at home with money in her
pocket. She can choose to work, and she always
could."
As an
occasional journalist herself, Pizzey's performance
relies on an aggressive but professional charm. And
in 15 years of being a minor public figure, there has
never been any shortage of simpering reporters keen
to help her out. Supposing her to be some sort of
feminist, they have always offered her an easy ride.
"Everybody
thought I was left-wing because that's where all the
caring comes from," she says in a perplexed
voice. "I am, in fact, nothing of the sort. I am
a very old-fashioned conservative. My priorities are
my home, my husband and my cooking."
Pizzey
is of course famous for her work with battered wives
in the early 1970s. If she didn't actually discover
domestic violence she was at least the person who
forced it forward as a major social problem. Her bold
act in setting up with Chiswick Women's Refuge in
1972 led to a series of celebrated court cases in
which Pizzey took on the hostile local council.
Newspaper
libraries have cuttings by the boxful which lay bare
the Pizzey past: how she was born in China in the
year the last war broke out, was traumatised by life
with her feuding parents, was married once and later
divorced, and is now a runaway in Santa Fe with a
husband, Jeff Shapiro, who is 20 years her junior.
Throughout
her public career Pizzey has been a relentless
fighter. Councils. judges, social workers and
government departments have all joined battering
husbands as objects of her anger.
"People
come to me for help and I have to fight for
them," she says of the endless storms that
gather around her. "Then I realise that I am in
the middle of a pitched battle that's been going on
for a very long time and I have to take the pressure
off the person who is probably absolutely
fatigued."
Even
in New Mexico she has not abandoned this pursuit. In
recent weeks, she has provided a safe house for a
woman who has absconded from Britain with a "tug
of love" foster child. Although the child, a
black girl aged 8, is a ward of the High Court,
Pizzey has decided that, whatever British justice
might say, the girl will not be returned to her
father.
When
Pizzey left Britain to write novels four years ago,
it had become clear that the self-confident
determination that leads Pizzey to take such actions
was increasingly directed at those who should have
been her friends. Now she has only contempt for the
women's movement, or "that bunch of smell
lesbians" as she gleefully describes them.
Her
attacks on women, however, are matched by a brusque
antagonism towards almost everybody else. Britain,
she explains, is an "arsehole country",
where the only place worth staying is London's Savoy
Hotel. "It's just a very boring, dull, grey
place now," she says of England, pausing to sip
her tea.
Santa
Fe is a tolerant town, where the culture fuses
Indian, Hispanic and Anglo traditions, but even her
neighbours get short shrift. "They are
roughnecks around here," she says, looking
across to neighbouring plots, where the likes of
lawyers and doctors live. "This is the biggest
house here and the women are appallingly
envious."
To
help her survive the isolation, Pizzey is collecting
around her the family she dominates. Besides Shapiro,
there is her daughter Cleo, aged 24, grandchildren
Kita and Amber, her "son" Russ, who is in
his 20s, black and is not related by blood. Then
there is Lucy, a 23-year-old student, Frank, 28, a
visiting missionary, and Chad, 9, a sort of
boy-from-next-door.
Challenging
the world, of course, can take a terrible toll. Her
own domestic life is anything but violent and yet
Pizzey seems battered and almost broken by the
conflicts she has sought. Despite her cheerful
attacks on her former foes, the occasional caustic
humour cannot disguise the change.
Pizzey
these days seems tired. For four months lately she
has been ill in bed and now has such trouble with her
left leg that she needs to keep it constantly rested.
"Well, it has all ruined my health," she
says, in the commendably blunt manner with which she
habitually confronts the truth.
"I
have always had very high blood pressure and when I
was still in England my doctor warned me that I was
at risk of having a heart attack," she explains,
as some of her eight dogs settle around us in the
boiling noontime shade. "But Jeff said: 'I am
taking you away from all this,' and so here we
are."
It
could have been an ideal home were it not for the way
she is. The neighbours, she says, are shooting her
dogs, and she feels it is time to move once more.
Money is running out and the house is up for sale.
"When
we leave here we are going to buy a 2,000-acre ranch
in the desert where nobody can trouble us," she
says, getting up to go and look at something in the
kitchen. "We are going to have a machine gun and
we will be able to kill people and bury them, and
nobody would know they were there."
| brian deer |
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