How Feminists Have Destabilized Marriage in Massachusetts

They’re Still Working Against Marriage with Our Tax Dollars

This story about the 25th anniversary of a women’s center in Greenfield explains how feminists have intentionally destabilized marriage throughout Massachusetts. They believe that women will not be “free” until marriage has been eliminated.

By Atty. J. Edward Pawlick
February 20, 2001

Most social workers in Greenfield back in 1975 were concerned with all the people and all the families.

But feminist Joan Featherman was thinking of only one group.

“I'd been working for a number of years in feminist concerns,” she told the Greenfield Recorder last month in a feature story about her 25th year in that city. Her only goal was to “help” the women of the area.

She was a federal VISTA volunteer and family law advocate with the poverty lawyers. They were intent on terminating marriage, not trying to help husband and wife through the rough spots. They started offering free divorces, not marriage counseling.

''Because of the free divorces, the battered women came in droves,'' Featherman told the Recorder.

‘Domestic Violence’ Was Important
In the first year, they reported that about two women a week called the emergency hot line as victims of “domestic violence.” But these lawyers define “domestic violence” to include “boy friends” of only a few days as well as married couples. They don’t report how many callers came from each category because, to them, there is no difference between boy friends and husbands.

Featherman and the poverty lawyers opened their new organization in 1976 at 34 Bank Row in Greenfield. The budget in 1977 was $5,231. Today they receive $1.6 million in federal and state money that is distributed by the Supreme Judicial Court, according to the Recorder. They have about 50 staff members, both full- and part-time and five offices in that rural area. They called it New England Learning Center for Women in Transition (NELCWIT).

There are 18 other organizations across the state just like it which are supported by the poverty lawyer programs of the SJC. But there is not one group of this kind for men in the entire state. The only groups for men are those which many men are required to attend if they wish to see their children or stay out of jail. These programs are run by other feminists and it is assumed in these programs that the men are the violent ones even if they are not. These re-education programs have been compared by those who have experienced them to those in Cambodia and Laos. Even so, they are not free to the men who must pay upwards of $1,000 to attend. No one is ever allowed to talk about their wives; everyone has only “partners.”

The radical feminists had announced in the 1960s that their goal was to replace the family as the fundamental unit of society. This was necessary, they said, in order for women to have their “freedom.” Even Betty Friedan stated that this might be necessary. They wanted the children raised by the government in gleaming daycare centers with both mothers and fathers out working.

It is apparent that Joan Featherman has successfully worked toward that goal in Franklin County for twenty-five years.

Legal Aid Became Politicized in the 1970s
Joan Featherman arrived in Greenfield in the 1970s because the local legal aid lawyers across the country were being replaced by lawyers from the federal government. This system of federal lawyers in every county in the country was started by Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.” It was soon supplemented with state money. All of the money is distributed in Massachusetts by the Supreme Judicial Court. The idea of local lawyers helping the poor as an organized effort has disappeared although many lawyers continue to do so on an ad hoc basis.

The goal of the poverty lawyers is to change the system, not represent just one party who is involved with a legal problem.

One of their favored groups is the feminists. Even though the research is now showing that a larger number of women are violent than men in domestic disputes, the goal of the "poverty lawyers" is to protect only women. The assumption is that all women are victims and all men are evil. There are 19 free legal centers across the state of Massachusetts that do nothing except represent "battered women," but there is no help at all for battered men.

Most lawyers and judges believe they are protecting individuals, but the radicals understand that the goal of their lawyers is to change the basic unit of society.

The federalization of the legal aid lawyers has increased litigation. We have become a litigious society. Up until the 1970s, protracted court battles were seen as a waste of time and money by everyone. They all realized they had an inducement to settle. All of this changed, however, when the "poverty lawyers" appeared. They had the resources of the federal government behind them and they had no reason to settle. They could, and do, use every trick to make the other party finally give up in desperation.

The people at NELCWIT will claim that they also try to help couples who wish to stay together. They have a course which they say is “designed for couples who wish to end violence in their relationship.” But the title itself implies that this course is aimed only at helping men overcome their “violent natures.”