No Place to Go: Local Histories of the Battered Women’s Shelter Movement (review)

This is a pioneering study of the battered women’s shelter movement in Canada in the 1970s and 1980s and a useful addition to the emerging scholarship on Second Wave Feminism in Canada.

Second Wave Feminism focused on ‘the politics of the body,’ linking ‘women’s equality with reproductive rights and safety from male violence.’ One of the local, community-based responses of feminists was the establishment of shelters and transition houses to assist and support abused women. Janovicek explores how these facilities brought activists into contact with bureaucrats at various levels of government and non-feminist voluntary organizations.

Janovicek’s strategy was to focus on small cities and rural communities where women may have had fewer options. She takes the reader to Thunder Bay and Kenora, Ontario, Nelson, British Columbia, and Moncton, New Brunswick, through a skilful use of oral history and institutional/organizational records. She is attentive to differences based on class, race, and sexual orientation and provides a complex and nuanced portrait of these institutions rooted in time and place. The decision to focus on two communities in Northwestern Ontario highlights the particular position of Aboriginal women who were caught between racism, the legacy of colonialism, and the legal restrictions of the Indian Act, which limited where women could live and maintain their status. The strategy of locating this study in four specific communities also highlights the importance of place in shaping opportunities and challenges. The women here are not small-town conservatives but rather often effective, pragmatic actors set on achieving concrete goals and frequently placed in the position of having to collaborate with people with different political positions.

Although Janovicek explains the importance of examining transition houses and shelters at the local level, there is no explicit discussion of why these particular communities were chosen. The decision to explore two communities in Northwestern Ontario is curious, as the experience of First Nations women would also have been seen in a Prairie example. The decision to overlook Quebec also leaves open the question of what was happening at the local level there. Finally, by coincidence, I read No Place to Go immediately after rereading the new edition of Brian Vallee’s Life with Billy (Key Porter 1986, 2008), the tragic story of a rural Nova Scotian woman, Jane Hurshman, who lacked any escape from an abusive domestic relationship, killed her common-law husband, and was subsequently acquitted by jury of his murder. It was a sobering reminder of how poorly served most rural areas were into the 1990s. While facilities existed in the communities examined here, many rural women like Jane Hurshman still had no place to go. Notwithstanding these absences, No Place to Go demonstrates that the ambitious efforts to provide safe housing for women fleeing abusive relations had consequences beyond immediate practical support for individual women in crisis. The shelter and transition house movement helped to change public attitudes toward domestic violence and made possible legislative changes to protect vulnerable women.