WE Survive Abuse/Tonya GJ Prince

Abuse does not always begin with a bruise. Sometimes it begins with humiliation. Sometimes it reaches for your name.

In this episode of the We Survive Abuse Podcast, Tonya GJ Prince explores two powerful tactics that can appear in abusive relationships: humiliation and control over a person’s name, identity, and reputation.

Humiliation can be used to make a person feel small in front of others, ashamed of themselves, afraid to speak, or desperate to avoid the next embarrassing moment. Control over names can travel another road. A person may mock your name, replace it with something you never chose, repeatedly call you degrading names, threaten your reputation, impersonate you, or try to decide what other people will believe when they hear your name.

The history of Tina Turner offers a striking doorway into this conversation. Born Anna Mae Bullock, she was given the stage name Tina Turner by Ike Turner, who trademarked the name as their musical partnership developed. Years later, after leaving an abusive marriage, Tina retained the name in their divorce and built an extraordinary solo career under it.

But this episode is not only about Tina Turner. It is about the Survivor whose name has been dragged through family conversations, workplaces, churches, courtrooms, group chats, neighborhoods, and social media. It is about the person who has been laughed at, renamed, embarrassed, impersonated, degraded, or told that somebody else gets to decide who they are.
If someone used humiliation to control you, your shame does not belong where they tried to put it.

If someone tried to damage your name, they did not become the author of your life.

Your name can still carry your work, your history, your dignity, your joy, and everything you build from here.

What happens when somebody else has the institutional power to decide what kind of woman you are—and the power to punish you when you refuse to obey?

In 1898, Omaha police arrested twenty-two-year-old Goldie Williams for vagrancy and photographed her as prisoner 228. She stood before the camera in hoop earrings and an extravagant feathered hat, her arms folded across her chest and an expression people are still trying to interpret more than a century later.

A few years earlier in Georgia, Mattie Crawford had entered an even harsher machinery of American law. Convicted of killing a stepfather she said had abused her, Mattie was sentenced to life and sent into Georgia’s convict labor system. At the Chattahoochee brickyard, guards forced her out of her skirts and into trousers for blacksmithing work, reportedly whipping her until she complied. Then Mattie became very good at the work.

By 1903, she was the sole blacksmith at Georgia’s state prison farm, a trusty whose skill had become known beyond the prison grounds. And when officials finally told her she could put her dresses back on, Mattie Crawford refused

.In this audio, we follow Goldie and Mattie into a largely forgotten history of African American women, vagrancy laws, convict leasing, forced prison labor, race and gender in the post-emancipation United States. Their experiences were different, and we keep them that way. 

Together, their surviving records leave us with a question that reaches beyond either woman’s life: What happens when somebody else has the institutional power to decide what kind of woman you are—and the power to punish you when you refuse to obey?

They Made Her Wear Trousers. Then Mattie Crawford Refused (audio ep) - WE Survive Abuse

Take a walk down the rabbit hole and find more sources here

For decades, the murder of Kitty Genovese was told as a chilling lesson about human indifference: a young woman screamed for help while 38 neighbors watched from their windows and did nothing.

There is one serious problem.
That is not what happened.

On March 13, 1964, 28-year-old Catherine “Kitty” Genovese was attacked and murdered near her home in Kew Gardens, Queens. Her death was horrific. But the famous story that grew around her death was also deeply flawed. Later reporting, court records, scholarship, witness accounts, and an extraordinary investigation by Kitty’s own brother have changed what we know about that night.

There were not 38 people calmly watching an uninterrupted murder. At least one neighbor shouted at Kitty’s attacker and temporarily frightened him away. The final attack occurred largely out of public view. Someone did attempt to contact police. And when Kitty was finally found, her neighbor and friend Sophia Farrar came to her, held her, and remained with her until help arrived.
Kitty Genovese did not die entirely alone.

In this episode of the We Survive Abuse Podcast, Tonya GJ Prince revisits the Kitty Genovese story with the benefit of what we know now. We look beyond the famous “bystander effect” story to examine what witnesses actually saw and heard, how an enormously influential media narrative took hold, and what can happen when a complicated human tragedy gets compressed into a lesson tidy enough for textbooks.

We also return Kitty to the center of her own story.

She was not merely “the woman nobody helped.” She was a 28-year-old woman with a life, work, relationships, people who loved her, and a future that was violently stolen.
This is a story about violence against women, public memory, journalism, the bystander effect, historical myths, and something just as important: our responsibility to go back and correct the record when better evidence becomes available.

Because sometimes history does not need another retelling.
Sometimes it needs a correction.

After the episode
For follow-up sources, visit the post at WESurviveAbuse.com

We Were Told Nobody Helped Kitty Genovese. That Wasn’t True. (audio ep) - WE Survive Abuse
.

People are getting awfully relaxed about what they call other human beings. We hear that "words are just words. "That everybody is "too sensitive." That a slur is acceptable because somebody heard it in a song. That degrading names for women are "ordinary" now. That if the speaker means no harm, the person being addressed should simply learn to live with it.

Black Americans have heard versions of this argument before.

Come ride with me into the history of America's Pullman sleeping cars, where Black porters could work through the night caring for passengers who couldn't be bothered to learn their names. Grown men were called “George,” regardless of what their mothers had named them. They were called “boy.” The disrespect became so familiar that porters had language for the experience: being “called out of one's name.”

Then history takes a turn almost too revealing to believe. In 1914, an organization arose to discourage passengers from calling porters “George,” with white men actually named George among those offended by the association. 

More seriously, years later, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters organized, and eventually individual name cards helped tell passengers something remarkably simple: the Black man serving this car had a name of his own.

From there, we travel with Mary McLeod Bethune, who knew exactly what racial hierarchy sounded like when someone presumed to call her “Mary” or “Auntie.” We follow women who challenged forms of address that defined them according to marriage. And eventually we arrive right back here, in our own time, where people are once again debating how much disrespect another human being should be expected to tolerate.

For Survivors, there is another story running quietly beneath this history. Pay attention to what happens when you tell someone, “Please don't call me that.”

When did respect become too much to ask? Not yesterday and not today either.

People make mistakes. Respect reveals itself in what happens after the correction. Does the person listen? Do they care? Do they adjust? Or does your simple boundary become an argument you are expected to lose? Names have never been nothing. 

Sometimes dignity marched in the streets. Sometimes it organized a union. Sometimes it stood upright in the voice of Mary McLeod Bethune. And sometimes it was small enough to fit on a name card aboard a train.

This episode is an invitation to remember something our ancestors understood very well: when people tell us how they wish to be addressed, listening is one of the simplest forms of human respect.

And if/when somebody tells you your name does not matter, history has a few stories on that.

The books, archival collections, interviews, museum and historical resources behind this episode are available with the accompanying blog post at wesurviveabuse.com

Follow them. Read beyond this episode. Find the original voices and discover the parts of the story I could never fit into one episode.

Resources Link

Before Claire Douglas became J.D. Salinger’s nineteen-year-old wife, she was a Radcliffe student with writing of her own—short stories, plays and essays. Then, at Salinger’s request, she burned them.
She left college only months before graduation and entered a marriage increasingly organized around the celebrated writer’s work, routines and need for solitude. Salinger had a private studio where his writing could continue. Claire raised their children on the other side of the door.

Her story holds a question women are still asking: How much of yourself can you surrender for love before love begins requiring your disappearance?

This episode follows Claire beyond the familiar biography of J.D. Salinger—from the writing she burned at nineteen in order to get married to the intellectual life she reclaimed after their marriage ended, eventually becoming a Jungian analyst and an author herself. Along the way, we explore reciprocity, interrupted dreams, coercive relationships, the lessons women are taught about sacrifice, and the wisdom that sometimes arrives only after we have lived long enough to know differently.

Claire knew what she knew. Then she lived. Then she learned.

And decades after burning her pages, she put her own name on a book.

What does solidarity actually require—and what happens when only one side is expected to practice it?

In this episode, Tonya GJ Prince begins with a principle that gets lost in conversations about war, injustice and coalition: solidarity is reciprocal. Caring about another community’s suffering should not require ignoring racism directed at your own. Compassion is not supposed to demand self-erasure.

And Black women have encountered this bargain before. During World War I, Black educators Addie W. Hunton and Kathryn M. Johnson crossed the Atlantic to serve Black American troops. But when Johnson sought to work among those soldiers, she encountered an astonishing contradiction: Black men could be sent overseas to fight a world war, yet they could still be characterized as too “rough” for a Black woman sent there to serve them.

Johnson did not simply accept that judgment. Her story opens a much larger conversation about Black women, service, racial stereotypes, boundaries, coalition politics—and what happens when people eagerly accept what Black women provide while becoming uncomfortable when we ask how we and the people we love are being treated.

We can mourn children thousands of miles away and speak about anti-Black racism at the same time. We can stand against atrocities without surrendering our dignity. We can care deeply about another people without disappearing from our own conscience. Because solidarity that only travels in one direction has another name

.And Black women are allowed to ask what comes back across the bridge.

For generations, women fought to move the line forward: toward safety, freedom, education, economic independence, bodily autonomy, and the right to move through the world without asking permission. But progress is not permanent.

Across the world, warning signs are flashing. Violence against women remains staggering. Girls are still being pushed out of classrooms, forced into marriage, exploited, harassed, and denied opportunities. Women are confronting new forms of digital abuse alongside old forms of violence, discrimination, poverty, and control. And some protections women once believed were settled are being questioned, weakened, ignored, or rolled back.

In this episode of We Survive Abuse, I walk through 13 alarming signs that women and girls are losing ground and why we should pay attention before today's warning becomes tomorrow's normal .This is not a conversation about fear. It is a conversation about awareness. Because history teaches us something women cannot afford to forget: rights can be won, protections can be built, and progress can be made. But none of it survives automatically.

We inherited ground that somebody fought for. Now we have to recognize when that ground begins to move beneath our feet. Listen, share this episode with the women and girls in your life, and keep the conversation going. Women are not powerless. Girls are not expendable. And paying attention is one of the ways we protect what generations of women struggled to build.

Episode: 13 Alarming Signs Life Is Getting More Dangerous for Women and Girls
Podcast: We Survive Abuse

This episode includes AI-generated content.

For generations, women have been told who they are, what they should become, what they should endure, and what roles they should accept. Womanhood has often been explained by those outside of it, while the voices of women themselves were ignored, minimized, or erased.In this powerful recorded episode, we explore 10 ways men have tried to define womanhood and the lasting impact of those definitions on women’s choices, dignity, safety, and freedom.

Through the wisdom of courageous women, we examine what happens when women challenge the limits placed upon them. We reflect on the lives and words of Shirley Chisholm, a trailblazing politician who refused to let others decide the boundaries of her ambition; Elizabeth Packard, a woman who fought against the misuse of power that allowed husbands and institutions to silence women; and Susanna Madora Salter, one of the first women in the United States to serve as a mayor, who demonstrated that leadership was never reserved for men.

This episode is not only about history. It is about recognizing the patterns that continue today.Who gets to define women’s priorities?
Who decides what women should sacrifice?
Who determines when women are allowed to say no?
And what happens when women reclaim the authority to define their own lives?These stories remind us that every generation of women has had to defend the simple truth that women are human beings with their own minds, voices, dreams, boundaries, and purpose.Join us as we honor the women who refused to shrink, surrender, or disappear.

Their courage leaves us with a question for today:What would change if women and girls were finally trusted to define themselves?

Listen, reflect, and carry forward the lessons of the women who opened doors before us.

What happens when the desire to stand with others becomes a demand to disappear?

In this episode of We Survive Abuse, “The Empty Chair” explores the difficult space between compassion and self-erasure. We are taught that solidarity means showing up, standing together, and making room for others. But too often, women are asked to remove their own chair from the table entirely.

This story examines a truth we must be brave enough to face: solidarity is not the same as unrestricted access. Support does not require surrendering boundaries. Compassion does not require abandoning safety, dignity, privacy, or the hard-won lessons of generations before us.

The empty chair represents the space we leave behind when we are pressured to believe that our needs are selfish, our boundaries are cruel, or our protection must always come last. It asks a deeper question: Who benefits when women are praised for making themselves smaller? Through reflection, a short story, and a Survivor-centered lens, this episode invites listeners to examine the difference between genuine solidarity and the quiet sacrifice of self-abandonment. Because true solidarity does not ask people to vanish.

It does not demand that women give up their voices to prove they care. It does not require survivors to ignore what they know about safety. It does not turn compassion into compulsory access.

There is room at the table for others without removing yourself from it.The chair belongs to you, too.

The Gate That Didn't Trust Anyone
At first glance, it's just an old wooden gate.It squeaks when it opens. It always swings shut. It stands quietly between a flourishing garden and a busy road, asking nothing more than to be opened—and remembered.
As a child, it seemed unnecessary. Why build a gate if you trust your neighbors?

Years later, that simple question revealed a truth far bigger than the garden itself.

In this episode, we'll explore how one ordinary gate became a lesson about love, boundaries, and the quiet wisdom of protecting what is precious. Together, we'll discover why the strongest safeguards are not built from fear, but from care—and why the smallest acts of protection often carry the deepest expressions of love.This is a story about vegetables, a grandfather, and a gate.Or so it seems.

Come sit for a short bit, and let's see what was really growing behind that fence.