The first refuge in the world devoted to the care and rehabilitation of violence-prone families was opened in Chiswick in London in 1971. In the early months a small house that we christened Chiswick Women’s aid was opened as a community centre to serve as a local meeting place for women locally and their children so that we could all pool our talents and work within our community.
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Those of us working in the field of domestic violence are confronted daily by the difficult task of working with women in problematical families. In my work with family violence, I have come to recognise that there are women involved in emotionally and/or physically violent relationships who express and enact disturbance beyond the expected (and acceptable) scope of distress. Such individuals, spurred on by deep feelings of vengefulness, vindictiveness, and animosity, behave in a manner that is singularly destructive; destructive to themselves as well as to some or all of the other family members, making an already bad family situation worse. These women I have found it useful to describe as ‘family terrorists.’ In my experience, men also are capable of behaving as ‘family terrorists’ but male violence tends to be more physical and explosive. We have had thousands of international studies about male violence but there is very little about why or how women are violent. There seems to be a blanket of silence over the huge figures of violence expressed by women. Because ‘family terrorism’ is a tactic largely used by women and my work in the domestic violence field is largely with women, I address this problem discussing only my work with women.
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In 1914, a newly painted portrait of American novelist Henry James was attacked by a suffragette wielding a meat cleaver. It’s not clear whether the target was the painting or the novelist himself. It’s possible that the suffragette had been enraged by James’s 1886 masterpiece, The Bostonians, a work that rivals the writings of Ernest Belfort Bax as the Anglosphere’s most prescient nineteenth-century analysis of the doctrine of female supremacism.

Henry James (1843-1916) was, in the early 20th century, easily the foremost living English-language novelist; he was considered the writer who had brought the realistic novel to its highest peak of achievement. Born in the United States, James had spent much of his adult life in Europe, often depicting in his fictions the contrast between American and European character types. His novel The Bostonians explored how the zeal of Massachusetts Puritanism found expression in the movement for women’s emancipation.

In 1913, friends of James had commissioned John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), a respected American portrait and landscape artist, also a chronicler of the transatlantic social scene (and friend of James) to paint James’s portrait in celebration of his 70th birthday. After approximately 10 sittings, the oil portrait was completed to James’s satisfaction (he declared it “a living breathing likeness”), and was exhibited for the first time in early May, 1914 at the Royal Academy in London, a prestigious and storied privately funded centre for the promotion of art.
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