Organizing refuge and domestic abuse services: a feminist oral history project

If freedom is understood as non-domination (Einspahr, 2010), then in the 1970s and 80s, Canterbury’s ‘Rising Sun’ domestic abuse refuge embodied the requisite collective agency and participatory processes. Where consciousness raising was understood as being inadequate to address women’s oppression, where working for or in the best interests of women rang hollow, genuine collaborative togetherness infused the social construction and rule making of the refuge. Drawing from interviews with the founders, volunteers and employees, this article’s methods build on scholarly interventions that aim to recover women’s lost history (Auchmuty and Rackley, 2016; Thompson, 2022), and its feminist empirical methodologies aim to resonate with that of the refuge community, understanding such work as a ‘continuous process of becoming’ (Whittingdale, 2021). The article traces the accomplishments of the refuge’s non-hierarchical ways of working, noting the method’s presented obstacles, while it expertly danced the fine line of the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ (Freeman, 1972).