Sandy Froman’s encounter with an intruder at her home changed her perspective about personal safety, and her response was to buy a gun. But for other women similarly concerned with self-defense, weapons may not be the best answer.
That’s the view of Susannah MacKaye, MA ’87, who ) 20 years ago co-founded Women Defending Ourselves, a nonprofit organization that teaches self-defense techniques using “the best tools a woman has against an assailant”—her body, her mind and her voice.
WDO sprang from the involvement of a handful of Stanford students in the mid-’80s who embraced the principles of self-defense and shared them with other women through a three-unit academic course. (The course was later dropped when a male student complained that it violated Title IX laws mandating gender equity.) MacKaye, a social worker for San Francisco County, has taught with WDO and related programs for most of two decades. “I would never say to a person it’s wrong to carry a gun—that’s a personal decision,” MacKaye says. “But I might encourage them to think about whether the gun really makes them safer.”
MacKaye says having a gun, or any weapon, can lead to overreliance on a tool that isn’t always available. “If your gun—or knife or whatever—is in your purse when you’re attacked, will you even be able to get it? The risk is believing that your power resides in that weapon, not in yourself.”
Holly Baldwin, ’93, who also teaches for WDO, points out that “the vast majority” of assaults against women are by people the victims know, and the assailants are almost always unarmed. “If you introduce a weapon into a situation where there wasn’t a weapon before, it escalates that situation, and could actually make it more dangerous for the defender,” she says.
Nevertheless, MacKaye is sympathetic toward women who only feel secure when they have a gun. “I don’t have a gun and I don’t want a gun. But if having a gun makes a woman feel safe, that allows her to be more free.”
