She was working as a waitress at a Howard Johnson’s when she met her first husband, a customer who always had books with him. “I’ll marry you,” she said when he proposed, “but I won’t do any housework.” The year was 1953.

When her self-help book “Getting Free: You Can End Abuse and Take Back Your Life” was published in 1982, she was just as straightforward. “If you decide to change your life, it may be challenging, exciting and rewarding,” she wrote, “but it will also probably be difficult, lonely and frightening at first.”

The battered women’s movement was in its infancy, and the book, translated into several languages, became widely used at women’s shelters and in support groups for victims of domestic violence.

Ginny NiCarthy — author, activist, social worker and truth teller — died on Sept. 23 in Seattle in a mountain-view home that she had rented in order to greet visitors in her final days. She was 92 and had been battling dementia for four years.