Coming under particularly close scrutiny is the health and social service establishment, which Beaudry concludes, has failed to adequately respond to the issue of family violence. She suggests that the institutions have been offering mere palliatives and crisis intervention in a system designed to maintain the status quo.

Beaudry insists that the shelters as they have often evolved- run by and for women- represent a more favourable answer to the real needs of abused women. She tells us how battered and isolated women want, and are capable of building, a network of mutual support and solidarity, regardless of social and economic standing.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Shelters: A Women’s Story
Forgotten beginnings
Women organize in a network
The government takes charge

2. The Emergence of Women’s Houses
Choosing the battleground: the house
An alternative to loneliness
Rejecting the house as a symbol of women’s duty
For the liberation of a women’s house
The houses as they were founded
A women’s house
An emerging response to a real need
The house as a public forum
Institutional counter-productivity
The institutional model

3. The Domestic Model of Organization
Unlimited time and energy
Experience transmitted orally
Diffuse power relations
Making room for children
Space defines practice
Conclusion

4. Ideological Orientations of Various Types of Shelters
Service ideologies
Four types of shelters

Conclusion

Appendix 1: Guide to dealing with domestic violence
Appendix 2: List, by region, of women’s shelters in Quebec

Micheline Beaudry holds a master’s degree in social work. Since 1977, she has been involved in organizing and developing centers for battered women in Quebec.