‘Feminism at the grassroots’: local refuge activism in the 1970s

Finn Enke has observed that feminism was ‘widespread in ways that historians have not yet explained’ and ‘operated through grassroots as well as legislative channels’. This article argues that during the 1970s, the women’s refuge movement constituted an important site of grassroots feminist circulations. By re-framing perceptions of domestic abuse, and centring victim-survivors, the early refuge movement achieved broad support from both Women’s Liberation Movement activists, and less overtly radical women. Driven by a National Women’s Aid Federation which initially sought to involve all groups, and many local activists who strove to build coalitions across class, social and generational divides, the movement became a site of collaboration and convergence. Groups and activists which did not identify as being part of the WLM have often been sidelined as peripheral or irrelevant to the refuge movement as an activist endeavour; this article demonstrates that through the refuge movement, such groups became both sites and agents of change.