The Origins of the Women’s Shelter Movement in Canada. In the supposedly enlightened ’60s and ’70s, violence against women was widespread. It wasn’t talked about, and women had few, if any, options to escape their abusers. Yet in 1973 — with no statistics, no money and little public support — five disparate groups of Canadian women quietly opened Canada’s first battered women’s shelters. Today, there are well over 600. In this book journalist Margo Goodhand tracks down the “rogue feminists†whose work forged an underground railway for women and children, weaving their stories into an unforgettable — and until now untold — history.
