Cirrus@Austlit

'On 16 May 1974, over 50 women marched from a small park in Glebe in Sydney to a vacant house that would become known as ‘Elsie’ a few blocks away. Anne Summers had first spied the house a few months earlier on a television show exposing the Church of England as a ‘slum landlord’ – running inner-city houses into the ground in the hope of obtaining urban renewal grants. Summers promptly wrote to the Church asking to meet to discuss turning the home into a refuge for women fleeing domestic violence. There were only two refuges in Sydney at the time and neither allowed women and children to stay more than a night. When the Church refused to even meet, Summers’ ‘outrage gave way to a sense of entitlement’, she recalled in her autobiography. ‘We needed a place so we would take one’. And so the activists, carrying tools, gardening implements and a new lock, and propelled by thrilling new feminist theory as well as anarcho-socialist beliefs in squatting rights, seized the vacant house by forcing a window with a shovel. Noticing the house next to it was also vacant, they did the same thing again. In that moment, ‘a rather larger than anticipated Elsie Women’s Refuge came into being’. Within five years, a hundred women’s refuges would be in operation.' (Editorial introduction)