The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 22

OPEN SPACE 22 THE GUARDIAN Tuesday September 17 19; Popular imagination sees battered husbands as something of a picture postcard joke. In reality, they have a private problem about which comparatively little is known. Tomorrow, the television series Where There's Life will be trying to find out more. David Shannon had a brief preview, and talked to a counsellor who has worked with families in WAS it simDlv criminal itv- crisis At the sharp end off a rolling pin the sink bv throwing a glass From left to right: Nancy Manahan, Rosemary Curb, and one ot their contributors, Wendy Sequoia. Picture by E.

Hamilton West loving women prohibited its strongest bonding force but the flaw in the scenario was sex. Homophobia operated in the convent with even more force than in soci Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manahan wrote Breaking Silence for themselves, for other nuns who had undergone some of the same, experiences, and for a wider audience of lesbian readers. But the publishers had other ideas. Film rights were sold, a deal made for a paperback edition, and extracts appeared in Forum. Predictable reaction from the Roman Catholic Church ensured the book even greater publicity.

The two editors were banned from appearing on television in Boston, and last week were turned out of their Dublin hotel by an outraged owner. Sarah Jane Evans met them in London komd off firiein)dlslh)ip IF VOU took Frank Taylor at his word, his back garden must have seemed an unusually dangerous place. When his first wife bashed a Kettle against his jaw and loosened two of his teeth, Frank told his doctor he'd walked into a tree. When he was driving her home from the off-licence and she smashed him on the face with a bottle, he said he'd fallen into the roses. Men will put up with a lot before theyll admit the true source of the damage.

Men are traditionally thought of as aggressors, not victims and while a woman with a black eye may get sympathy, a man with a black eye remains a figure of fun. Battered husbands do not yet have an Erin Pizzey to champion them and exist in the popular imagination mainly as a picture postcard joke: un-macho weeds who quiver while mountainous wives unload saucepans and rolling pins on A 'BAMFORTH COMIC SORRY MR SIMPSON, BUT MY HUSBAND'S OUT AT THE MOMENT! them. In the real world real battered husbands are as funny as being hit on the head with a rolling pin. Frank Taylor is six foot one, his first wife five foot two. Now very happily re-married, he lived with her for 18 years.

Ten years into their marriage she threw a vacuum cleaner down the stairs at him. Later, she averaged one attack a week. "There were times I just couldn't go to work," he says: "so battered I couldn't see out of one eye, or my mouth so bruised I couldn't talk." He planned to leave after being hit with the kettle, but his eldest son persuaded him to stay. Only when that son married did he finally move out "not out of lack of affection for my wife, but simply for self preservation." Battered husbands, like battered wives, can be remarkably long-suffering and loyal. Why his wife behaved so violently towards him is not easily explained.

The outbursts were very unpredictable and Frank does not seem the sort of man most normal people would want to hit. "She'd accuse me of having affairs with everybody we ever met," he says. "I can assure you I didn't. When I was there she couldn't bear the sight of me; when I was out of sight she wanted me back. I can only think there was a touch of insanity about her." Did he never retaliate? "My Dad told me you should never strike a woman.

When I was frustrated, I used to go and beat hell out of the garden. Mine was the best dug for miles." Husband battering is the subject of tomorrow's programme in the series Where There's Life at 7 pm on ITV. It includes interviews with Linda from Milton Keynes who first attacked her boyfriend with a frying pan no going back. I tried just screaming and shouting at him but I wanted to hit him. I really used to enjoy hitting and Sue and John Wilson of Northampton.

Their problems started with the arrival of an unplanned con three years ago and burst into violence when she discovered John was having an affair. "I wanted him to make up his mind to stay or go to her," she says, "and if he wanted to go, then not keep me hanging about." The violence continued for three months in which time, as well as hitting, scratching and kicking John, she dented into it, put a two and a half toot cracK in a wan Dy pusmng him against it, and once "ripped up all his trousers and shirts so he'd have nothing to wear when he went to see her. I had to be angry with him to show my hurt I couldn't express it any other way." The fact that Sue was also having a secret affair at that time in no way curbed her anger true life is stranger than Dallas and neither did the presence of their son. When John finished his affair, the violence ceased and it hasn't re-surfaced since. Because husband battering remains a private problem and much less common than wife or child battering, research into it is sparse and generalisations about it difficult to make.

A survey by the Families Need Fathers charity discovered that, in 10 per cent of all marriages breakdowns where violence was involved, wives had been violent towards their husbands. Diane Core, a counsellor who used to run a family crisis centre in Ormskirk, Lanes, remembers dealing with an average of 30 to 40 husband battering cases a year. Pre-menstrual tension, post natal depression, the menopause and sterilisation can all contribute towards releasing a woman's violence, and "mental disorders" are the commonest if rather vague catch-all explanation for why it happens. Apart from injuries to the husband, long term effects on children are the most alarming by-product of the problem. Even when not subjected to violence themselves, children are much more likely to behave violently to their partners if they've seen their parents fight Violence resembles an addiction in that, once it has taken a grip, it can always threaten to recur.

The greatest challenge for those who've succumbed to it is to find a way of crushing it when it seems about to break out again. Sue Wilson slams doors, smashes glasses and shouts but no longer beats up her husband. Jill Paynton, another member of the Where There's Life audience, used to buy cheap cups and saucers from the market. "When I thought it was coming on again," she says, A 'BAMFORTH' COMIC tea "WHAT SIZE IS YOUR HUSBAND'S NECK MADAM?" "IT'S ABOUT THAT SIZE MISTER" "I'd stand by the bin and smash them." The longer violence continues, the more difficult it is to control. Partly through shame and embarrassment, partly through mistrust of "do-gooders," couples may feel obliged to sort the problem out themselves usually just a receipe for more blood.

But those who have had the courage to ask for professional help often praise it highly: Sue Wilson first consulted her health visitor who put her on to the Family Welfare Assocation, and she and John continue to pay them regular visits. A change in public attitudes would- make it easier for couples to own up to their problem and seek help. "When I finally told friends and colleagues what had been happening to me," says Frank Taylor, "Most of them reckoned I'd flipped my lid. They thought I was exaggerating, that I was going through the male menopause. Nobody could believe it of my sweet little blue-eyed wife." Until the rest of us start recognising husband battering as a danger and not a joke, children's lives will continue to be ruined and fathers' lives to- be lost.

Frank's vacuum cleaner only just missed. "LESBIAN nuns I know are going to dance! In convents this book will go around like hotcakes, just the way The Hite Report did. Everybody read it. Lesbian nuns will be more -self-conscious about this book. They're also going to be listening for the response from other members of the community and praying to God it's okay All hell's going to break loose." Sister Sara was right.

When Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence was published by a small but well-established feminist and lesbian press in the USA in April, all hell did break loose, and not just among nuns. Rosemary Curb, one of the book's editors, recalls some of the 30 radio phone-ins from her home. "I had people calling in saying 'have you ever heard of Sodom and and 'You're the tool of the Jewish Masonic conspiracy' and much else besides. "The book came out of the process of healing," says Nancy Manahan, who, like her co-editor, was once also a nun. They wrote it for themselves and other nuns who had undergone some of the same experiences, but also for a wider audience of women readers and for those on women's studies courses.

They were expecting it to be for a lesbian audience, but by the time the book was on the stalls the issue had turned into a classic author-publisher dispute. Naiad Press had made the most of the book's potential beyond the narrow confines of a lesbian readership. Film rights were sold to ABC, a deal was made for a mass market paperback edition to appear in 1986; and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston had the two editors banned from appearing on Boston's Channel 4 thus guaranteeing the book an even larger audience. The real blow came when extracts appeared in Forum under the heading Sex Lives of Lesbian Nuns. There was little enough to excite Forum's readers the book is concerned with lesbian orientation rather than lesbian sexual activity but for the contributors, who had signed away all their rights, it was a snocK.

It was a shock, too, for the book's editors, one of whom had been consulted before the Forum deal, but neither of whom knew what they were letting themselves in for: We didn't Know what orum was." Within the lesbian commun ity the affair has caused a tremendous stir, fanned by the huge national publicity for the book. Sales figures so far of 100,000 and 150,000 are being bandied around, and the editors have oeen condemned for making money out of such a serious matter. racial bloodlusj or hooligan ism? Or was it a crueW enforced idleness which triop gered the scenes of riot have left great tracts of our communities still burning today? Hordes of idle rich are stilL terrorising the Surrey com-. muter oeit setting are ten houses, drowning family pets in swimming pools and driv- ing large cars across golf courses. The centre of Guildford burned out last night as crazed youths beat up lower-upper middle class shoppers, smashed up restaurants, knocked helmets from police-, men's heads and rescue services with debris Harrods carrier bags as they -tried to reach terrified stock-" brokers, accountants and- dentists trapped in their Tudor homes.

i The commuter belt was the first area in the country extend community policing to set up vigilante groups, whot last mgnt naa to oe neipew away from the rioting Hell's Angels. A community leader said from the scene, where burned out Range Rovers, overturned Volvo estate cars and piles off green wellies still smouldered: "They should have seen this coming. Theses people have been harassed by the Inland Revenue and VAT men and charity collectors for too lone. They've had to put" up with racial abuse and derogatory names Hooray Henries, Chinless Charlies, and Brainless i' Upper Crust Twits." A government spoKesman" said: 'These people have got beyond the point where they know how to spend their money, and some are deeply resentful that they have I blame other political partieS" for making these people into' party political targets in society. Is it absurd to oiame despair? -jr 11 Here is the News: Today.

the Punch and Judy Party conterence onened in Biggies- cum Algy. The party leaders Bitt have talked about the! i -1 l. i i i lueuiugivai ciasu which nab threatened to split the alliance in the run up to the next election. Bryan speaking from Lands End, and Brian Bitt, speaking from' John O'Groats, both said that there is no difference of' opinion between them on policy over defence, health and social services, environ-' ment, education, employ-1 ment, economics or toreign" affairs, and there will be no" question of internal dissent when they are Prime Minister. And now over to Bryony Bridge reporting live from' the Punch and Judy Party conference in Biggies cum Algy, where party leaders-Bryan Byte and Brian Bitt both said tonight that there is no rift between them on policy over defence, health and social services, environ-' mental education, employe ment, economics or foreign, affairs and there would be na internal dissent when they were Prime Minister.

Thank vou. Brian. This is Bryony Bridge reporting live from the Punch and Judy Party conference in Biggies" cum Algy where the tonight is that both party leaders Bryan B.vte and Brian Bitt have said there is no rift between them in policy over defence, health and social services, environment, edu- cation, employment, econo- mics or foreign affairs, and there will be no internal dissent between them when they are Prime Minister. This is Bryony Bridge returning' you to Brian in the studio. Thank vou.

Bryony. That was Bryony Bridge reporting live from the Punch and Judy Party conference which opened today in Biggies Algy, where the news is that party leaders Mr Bryan Byte and Mr Brian Bitt have both" said there is no rift between' them on policy on defence, neaitn and social services, environment, employment, economics or foreign affairs, and there wilj be no internal dissent they are Prime Minster. Ana now tor the rest ot tne news. Drunken footballers in the First Division match, between Goolies and killed the referee: War has been declared between the North and the South islands of New Zealand, and Switzer-'" land has disappeared. But -back to the main story of the day 75 Desk for computer, mlnl-odlce or study.

Plus storage from cubes to wardrobes, shelving, trestles.etc", Mall-order catalogue or visit us: CubeStore 58 Pembroke Rd W8 01-994 6016 (also Silk Notts) I VTr acAitel? I' 2 during the day would act as if nothing was the matter: "It was unreal. I did the only sensible thing to do in such a situation. I went crazy." The mental anguish these former nuns describe does not make ideal bedtime reading, particularly because they describe their experiences with a detachment borne of painful self-anaylsis. Many were working-class girls who went to convent schools and had crushes on the nuns who taught them. Some, too.

had haa uneasy adolescent experiences with boys. Others had become used early to the caring role, helping to bring up brothers and sisters. The conflict between their vocation and their emotions expressed itself in ulcers and psychosomatic illness. One seriously injured her back, and was allowed no treatment: "Your back injury is all in your head," she was told. By the time she left the order six years later and saw a doctor the damage was irreparable.

Several nuns were sent to mental hospitals by their orders, and underwent electric shock treatment. Again and again the nuns attempted to express their feelings at confession; none was able to name herself as a lesbian but each one recognised the confusing strength of her "particular friendship" for another nun. The sin of PFs runs through the book, the abbreviation giving these convents the unlikely air of an Angela Brazil school. One nun actually brought herself to declare that she was homosexual, but the priest assured her that she wasn't: "That was the first time in my life I'd ever told anyone else how I felt and he'd denied it because he didn't want to hear it. Everyone denied it." Not everyone was opposed to PFs, and there are several mother superiors portrayed in the book who act with commendable humanity.

This is nicely illustrated by an 1 anecdote from the 1920s, when an elderly provincial at a community meeting exclaimed, "Let them go to it! Thank God somebody loves somebody!" Many express profound satisfaction at having lived in a unique community of independent women. But there is also an underlying regret of lost opportunity, voiced most clearly by Ayyelet Hashas-char: "Looking back I see now that the convent was an early version of the women's separatist movement. We were women who left behind the world in which women were given to men by men. We were all lesbians, to varying degrees, depending on our awareness of ourselves as women-identified women. The very setting which could have fostered women of a food 'PA'ATS nAili lYlf) profit-making.

To ensure this a magazine must have an image. Images play an essential, if perhaps despised, role in society people have a need to identify themselves with someone or something. Unavoidably (some would say regrettably) people do fall into distinct categories and each of these categories is catered for by the magazine industry: hence we have Woman's Own type magazines, The Lady and The Tatler group, Spare Rib and finally the "glossies" Cosmopolitan, 19, Company, etc. Now can you imagine a -srSTi I ahan). While the population is decreasing, recruiting of nuns is going up, though it is not keeping pace with the numbers who die each year, and orders are top heavy with nuns in their 60s, 70s and 80s.

So how many nuns could be lesbian? "Kinsey put the proportion of the population that was homosexual as 10 per cent, but that was years ago. In some single-sex environments we think the percentage is much greater. "In convents it's 20 per cent, maybe even 50 per cent, though we're talking here about lesbian orientation, not just those who are sexually active." In Breaking Silence, the contributors break the rule of silence of their orders, and they are breaking the Church's silence of centuries about lesbianism though there have been oblique references from time to time. In the fifth century St Augustine warned against carnal love in convents; in the thirteenth century two Church councils prohibited nuns from sleeping together; while in the sixteenth century two nuns were burned for using "material instruments, which are thought to have been dildoes. Breaking Silence also refers to a third silence, between nuns who are lovers.

Mary Brady described how she and another nun became lovers, secretly at night. But her partner would never discuss what was happening and shadow HANP ety at large." Sister Maria (a pseudonym, like many names in the book) is 65 and became a nun in 1935. She has a very clear view of the place of lesbians in the Church: "Homosexuals belong to the soul of the Church. Women who are homosexuals the lesbian community are a vital part ot tne unurch." Pat Hynes, who started the Bread and Roses women's centre in Cambridge. Mas sachusetts, remembers the positive aspects of her time as a nun: "We lived with women who shared the same attrac tion to otner women, a common SDirit of idealism.

and a tremendous amount of goodwill, high expectations. ana erotic-energy." The community of women was not enough for those who left, but they found it some times even naraer to discover an identity in the outside world. Most of those not in orders seem to be on the fringes of society in community work, or they are in education, areas where they can continue their questioning of materialism expressed in their vow of poverty. Only five of the 49 nuns and ex-nuns who tell their stories in this book (chosen from the several hundred who wrote in offering their stories) have kept to their Catholic faith, though practically all retain a sense of spirituality, which is sometimes expressed by joining covens, or practising pagan feminism through astrology, godless imagery, tarot, dreamwork, I Ching, herbal healing, meditation, massage and body work. Are they not caught in a time warp of the 1960s, in the search for alternative faiths of that decade when so many of them became postulants? Rosemary Curb vehemently denies this suggestion.

"We are the vanguard." The Church is one of many patriarchal institutions which achieves the warping and confining of women to serve the patriarchy of men. The only options promoted for women are to be of service to men. Women aren't seen as whole persons. One reason why women welcome this book is because it says that if nuns can be lesbians, women can be anything. It takes two ends of a polar scale and puts them together.

It's the ultimate taboo, that women could be spiritual and sexual. Breaking Silence: Lesbian Nuns on Convent Sexuality, edited by Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manahan, Columbia Books, 9.95 hardback, 5.95 paperoacic. mountain magazine aimed at all women (as Chinyelu Onwurah suggests)? It would be impossible and unrealistic to have a magazine which catered for white, black, Asian, heterosexual, lesbian, working-class, middle class, upper class, young, middle-aged and old women. Sheer chaos! S. Marshall, London W5.

By any other name CHRISTENA Appleyard's animadversions cannot be allowed to pass without comment (Letters, September 3). In an otherwise exemplary treatment of that old teaser, "How Can Women Get the BMWs?" Ms Rose Rouse (August 28) can surely be allowed her solitary and uncharacteristic lapse in nomenclature. It is difficult, is it not, to believe that in the editorial offices of the Sunday People such minor taxonomic faux-pas are suppressed with any very notable vigour! Ne sutor ultra crepidam, Ms Appleyard! Nigel Andrew. Carshalton, Surrey. Women's editor Brenda Polan Two more unlikely, exploiters of lesbian nuns you could not hope to meet.

They present a cheerful, calm exterior, with a certain personal strength which makes them appear for-all the world like, well, ex-nuns. In conversation they appear to lack the intensity British ex-nuns express, but this may have something to do with the superficial veneer of American-culture. The book, is neither potboiling rubbish nor self-indulgent lecturing, though the quality of the contributions varies. The title has been changed for the British edition. Clearly, the original was thought too direct for the British, hence Breaking Silence, which could be anything from the autobiography of a former mute to a book on the psychology of farting.

Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manahan say, sadly, that they are yet again let down by a ublisher. The UK subtitle, esbian Nuns on Convent Sexuality, is not what the book is really about. Neither does Naiad Press seem to have found the most appropriate UK publisher in Columbia Books, whose other autumn titles include The Official 1985 National Football League Record and Fact Book, John Lennon, The Soaps Quiz Book, The Extremely Serious Guide to Sex, and The Male, Macho and Magnificent Calendar. There are around 119,000 nuns in the US could be 50,000 less after they read this book," says Nancy Man the incentive for Ethiopian farmers to crop intensively in subsequent seasons, thereby aggravating rather than solv-' ing the problem. More generally and in the long term, the best EEC policy towards agriculturally based Third World economies is to keep the surpluses safely locked-up and mouldering in Europe's silos and not to pursue a policy of pushing subsidised bundles of surplus commodieties onto already depressed world markets, thus bringing periods of low prices that may destabilise fragile rural communities in the Third World.

The direct and logical link claimed by the Mountain Movers to exist between EEC food mountains and World starvation, appears in practice to be tenuous. Benefits accruing to the world's starving from moving "mountains" depend upon what the "mountains11 comprise and the conditions pre- -vailing' in the receiving regions. Although, structural surpluses are probably to be a long term feature of developed nations' agricultural policies, it does not automatically follow that redistribution to the Third World will be to the good, and there is some evidence to- suggest that such a policy could be posi- The starving in the fair I Cas use? BY pkmcesspi) UF trt POUNDS 2. AIM iDEOLQCfttM JS mrCHMG SWEATS, ill fattem wwe If it tls LETTERS THE Greenham women's pro tests at EEC intervention stores, led by the "Mountain Movers" (September 9) is a commendable means of bringing to public attenton the disparity between living standards in the developed world and those in the Third World. And undeniably this issue is brought into sharp tocus dv Europe's long term structural surpluses, which contrast sharply and tragically with mass starvation in Ethiopia.

Bevbnd the symbolic. however, it becomes more difficult to perceive the direct connection between the rich countries' stores and Third World starvation. Recent reports from Ethiopia would seem to suggest the physical quantity of food is not per se the most limiting factor in relieving those areas still suffing from the worst of the famine; instead it is the capacity of the transport system that is bound to be wanting. Food-aid may also be dir-. ectlv detrimental: as Ethiopia's harvest is gathered this autumn, residual food-aid could be undermining local food prices and reduce ft tively detrimental to important long term development plans.

Ben White. 49 Conischffe Avenue, Newcastle upon Tyne. In her own image I SHOULD like to challenge the final paragraph of Chiny-elu Onwurah's article about women's magazines and what she calls the "media apartheid" situation of the magazines (September 3). Magazines are an industry and, like any industry in a competitive society, intent on.