ABSTRACT
The anti-violence service organizations could not avoid addressing issues of race and class and in general were ahead of advocacy organizations such as the National Organization for Women in confronting the intersection of gender, race, and class. Frequently, feminist service organizations began with a visionary leader, passionate about an issue and determined to help women who were struggling against gender oppression. This was certainly the case with Jody Pinto, an artist and in 1971 the founder of Philadelphia’s Women Organized Against Rape (WOAR), one of the most effective and long lasting of the anti-rape organizations to emerge in the early 1970s. The pattern of rape crisis centers followed by battered women’s shelters, which Schecter documented nation-wide, played out in Philadelphia. Peggy McGarry, the founder of Women Against Abuse, which opened the first shelter for battered women in 1977, was a leader in many ways very similar to Jody Pinto, the founder of WOAR.
