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on Hip-hop**
Two feminists who came of age with the music and the culture take a long, hard look at its impact--for better and worse--on young women, and reassess its importance in their lives. > by Tara Roberts and Eisa Nefertari Ulen

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Sandy credits Ward for giving her the confidence to leave. "One of the first things you did, well, it wasn't something you wrote on a legal pad," she says, looking fondly at Ward. "You hugged me. I was just so embarrassed. And you made me feel welcome." But without Ward's free legal help, Sandy says, "I wouldn't have been able to do it."

With a population of just under 600,000, the state has only five part-time attorneys--partially funded by the federal Violence Against Women Act--who work exclusively with victims of domestic violence. Consequently, many battered women go into court--seeking a relief-from-abuse order, a divorce, or custody of their children--without legal representation. Their husbands or boyfriends are more often able to afford an attorney. Clients are usually referred to Ward through Safeline, a local hotline and advocacy organization.

Isolation compounds her clients' problems. One third of them lack phones, because, in a state as sparsely populated as Vermont, the cost of maintaining telephone lines across long distances results in staggeringly high monthly rates. And though most families have a car, "it may go to work with the batterer," says Judy Szeg of Safeline.

But isolation is also about lack of skills and hope. Sometimes Ward helps clients get a high-school equivalency diploma or a job. Other times it's as simple as working up a budget to pay off debt that an abuser has accumulated over the years. Perhaps the best measure of Ward's success is that so few of her clients have returned to their batterers or entered other abusive relationships. "Don't let him frighten you," she tells a client whose ex-husband has threatened to take the kids. Rhonda, a tiny, birdlike woman who's determined to appear cheerful, is clearly rattled. "There's nothing he can do," Ward tells her, giving her a bear hug. Rhonda's eyes are troubled, but she breathes deeply and promises to keep in touch.

Ward never intended to become a "domestic violence road warrior," as the American Bar Association has dubbed her. For 17 years, she and her husband, Harold, were big-rig truckers. Ward got her college degree by mail, writing papers on a laptop in the sleeper of their 18-wheel Diamond Reo, while Harold drove through the night.

Unfortunately, that legacy wasn't just a specter from the past. In 1991, her sisters paged her on the road. Her brother, Richard, had raped a child in the family, and after two years of holding back, the girl told a counselor about it. "My God it's happening again," Ward breathed. The youngster had already been molested by Ward's father when she was three--the same age Ward was when he began raping her. Prosecutors felt then that the girl was too young to testify. But now Ward and her three sisters stood firm. "We did for her what wasn't done for the rest of us," she says. "We told her we believed her. And we told her it was important that she come forward."

It turned out that Richard had already sexually molested two other little girls. "In Richie's case, he was just living up to his father's expectations," says Harold angrily, sitting at the couple's kitchen table in Vershire, Vermont. "He was expected to grow up to be a child abuser. It was like putting a goddamned deer head on the wall. It was a trophy."

Alarmed, Ward put the brakes on her cross-country trucking until she made sure that her brother was safely behind bars. "Please get treatment," she wrote him in prison. Despite his refusal, the state parole board announced it wanted to release him after two years.

And so Ward led the charge to stop that from happening.

She wrote a 15-page report to the parole board arguing that it was misinterpreting state law. Faxed press releases to newspapers and television stations urging them to attend the hearing. And brought photographs of the little girl to make her point in human terms.

"This is the child that he has abused," Ward told the board. "When she was three years old, she was abused by her grandfather. When she was six, she was sexually assaulted by her uncle. When she was nine, she had to testify in court. Now she's 12. What am I supposed to tell her is going to happen to her when she's 15?" Anger flickers in her eyes: "I'll tell you what happened," Ward says, her foot on the accelerator as she recalls how, despite a successful campaign with the parole board, the girl, at age 16, had to face her abuser again, when he was given a furlough to attend a family funeral. Ward is lost in thought for a minute, then resumes. "But that is a lot of why I'm doing what I'm doing. The legal system is really hard on victims. They get victimized again and again." That experience convinced Ward to enroll in law school, where she focused on family law and won a bevy of awards, including the 1998 Outstanding Law Student of the Year from Who's Who in American Law Students.

Alexander Banks, Ward's supervising attorney at the clinic, points out, "Wynona brings something to the equation that's unique, something that, even if I tried my hardest, I couldn't do. She says to the women: 'I have been where you are, and I have gotten out. Walk beside me and I will help you get out.'" Today, she's as concerned about how to keep the aging Ram Charger on the road as she is about keeping her work on course. Her original grant runs out next September. Ward is hoping to raise enough money to hire another attorney and a secretary.

But she never wants to lose the personal touch. "I don't feel that I'll burn out the way other people do," she says. "Because, let's face it, this is my life."

Alexis Jetter is the coeditor of "The Politics of Motherhood: Activist Voices from Left to Right" (Dartmouth College).

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALLAN PENN

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