Women’s Aid and the services in the present domestic violence sector arose originally out of pioneering women’s activism, fighting for social change. The direct connection from today back to the movement against violence against women of the 1970s is one which is sometimes now forgotten. Some present-day domestic violence workers know little of the redoubtable feminist heritage on which their work was founded.
... The new women’s initiatives confronted in clearly visible ways men’s rights and power within the family and society. Not only were women walking out of their marriages and relationships as soon as they found there was somewhere safe to go. They were then going to live with groups of other women. The very fabric of marriage and relations between men and women was being bravely challenged in a quite brazen way. The establishing of refuges was, and is, without doubt, something to celebrate. This short book is part of honouring the women involved and the pure audacity of it, at its beginning.
Radical early politics
The radical early politics of refuges are revisited in the book so that we can perhaps learn from them today. Refuges always tried to do things differently. They mainly operated as collectives for twenty or thirty years, until the move to domestic violence organisations having CEOs developed around the 2000s. Being a collective is a brave and extremely challenging way to work, especially while dealing with something as traumatic as domestic abuse. The women concerned worked out innovative ways of doing this. One way was to try to break down power differences between the women providing the services and those using them. Some of these policies have been lost today, but they involved the women in the refuge being members of the collective, and being involved in decision-making at both local and national levels in Women’s Aid. These were brave and pioneering moves forward to flatten hierarchies and share power. They transformed the lives of many (although of course not all) women and children.