Minding My Gap
I’ve been attempting for the better part of a week now to try and write up a history of Women’s Shelters. It’s been… difficult, to say the least.
The first difficulty has been in deciding what counts as a Woman’s Shelter. Previous to anything opening specifically for women, there were homeless shelters that many battered women would go to. There were also advocacy groups and store-front advice providers (like the Citizen’s Advice Bureau in the UK) that would allow women to stay there when they had no place else to go. Often, women would just open their homes to other women who needed a place to stay. Do these count? They weren’t specifically done with an eye to ending domestic violence, but at the same time, they did help women get out of bad domestic situations, even temporarily.
The second difficulty comes from the contradictions that sprout up when trying to determine when the “first” shelter specifically for battered women opened. I’ve had dates and locations varying from the early 60s to the late 70s, from the UK to California, Chicago, or Massachusettes. I’ve found little to nothing almost anywhere else I’ve looked.
This is a history that takes place in the lifetime of my parents, and I still can’t find out what really happened. When did the idea that Battered Women needed a place to go get publicly acknowledged? When did the fact that beating a wife was wrong become a commonly-accepted idea? When did hotlines and national advocacy groups start with the idea of ending wife abuse?
I can’t find it, and this gap in my history frustrates me.
What I can safely tell you is this:
A second wave of feminism had kicked off, expanding the focus from legal equal rights (such as the right to vote and hold property) to include ‘actual’ rights (such as equality and balance in child-raising and housework). One of the ways that they did this was to just get women talking to each other about things. Groups of women would get together and talk about various subjects, like how they felt about having children, or what they thought about their husbands’ contributions to the housework. They were called Conciousness-Raising Groups, and they were modelled after groups with the same goals in the Civil Rights movement.
The point of this was for women to realise that their problems were shared problems. Arguing about the housework wasn’t something that was unique to one woman just having a difference of opinion with her husband - most men at the time weren’t helping with the housework. Women in these groups would discuss how this was a universal problem, and only universal solutions would fix it. In talking about these things, they realised how “the personal is political” - what happens in your personal life is affected by the overall society that you’re raised in.
When I started looking for information on Women’s Shelters and realised that they had started cropping up at around the same time that Consciousness-Raising Groups were discussing the societal pressures that lead to sexism and mistreatment of women, I thought it would be easy to find and point to some sort of causal link. I was certain there would be research I could at least get the edges of and dig further into later on.
Maybe there is, and I just haven’t found it.
Either way, I leave it there for you: I can’t tell you when or why specific places for women to go to when they were battered started cropping up. I can’t tell you when the idea that beating your wife was wrong came about.
I just know I’m damn glad it did.
Thanks, Feminism.