Susan Schechter

Susan Schechter (May 1, 1946 – February 3, 2004) was an American feminist, activist, scholar, and a founding mother of the battered women’s movement. Her intellectual and political contributions to the understanding of male violence against women are foundational to the coercive control framework that now shapes domestic violence legislation across the world — yet her role in that lineage is almost universally omitted from mainstream accounts of the field’s history. This platform is committed to correcting that omission.

Schechter earned a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from Washington University in St. Louis and a master’s degree in social work from the University of Illinois Chicago. She began her direct work with domestic violence as director of women’s services at a Chicago YWCA, through which she helped found one of the first women’s shelters in Chicago in the late 1970s. She went on to develop AWAKE (Advocacy for Women and Kids in Emergencies) at Boston Children’s Hospital — the first domestic violence program established within an American children’s hospital. In 1991 she became Clinical Professor at the University of Iowa School of Social Work, a position she held until her death.

Her landmark 1982 work, Women and Male Violence: The Visions and Struggles of the Battered Women’s Movement (South End Press), documented the grassroots origins of the anti-violence movement and established the feminist analysis of male power and control over women that would shape a generation of scholarship, advocacy, and law.

It was Susan Schechter who introduced Professor Evan Stark to the concept of coercive control. Stark acknowledges this directly in Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life (Oxford University Press, 2007), describing her as “a founding mother of the battered women’s movement and its political conscience and historian.” The framework Stark named and developed — now criminalized in multiple countries — traces its intellectual origins to her.

Schechter was honored with the National Crime Victim Service Award and was eulogized in Violence Against Women by Jill Davies and Jeffrey Edleson (Volume 10, Number 9, September 2004). Her papers are held in the Harvard University archives. The University of Iowa’s Center on Children and Families was renamed in her memory in 2002.

She died of endometrial cancer on February 3, 2004. Her work did not die with her. It lives in every piece of legislation that names coercive control as a crime.