Pizzey wanted to change those attitudes. The first of her many books on domestic violence, Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear, led to a TV documentary. She attracted fans such as Boy George and the author Fay Weldon, and rich backers such as the newspaper editor David Astor. The Chiswick refuge itself became famous: Roger Daltrey and Kenney Jones of The Who paid a visit in 1980.

But there’s a reason Pizzey has faded from memory, even as the movement she championed endures. From the start, her relationship to the women’s-liberation movement—a loose collection of groups that held an annual conference starting in 1970—was fractious. It quickly became poisonous: In Sweet Freedom, Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell’s account of the second wave, they noted that four years after the creation of Pizzey’s lone outpost in Chiswick, 28 other groups had set up refuges, and 83 others were working on doing so. But in 1975, they wrote, Pizzey metaphorically “stormed out” of the movement, and has “gone her own way ever since.”

“She single-handedly did as much for the cause of women as any other woman alive,” Deborah Ross wrote in The Independent in 1997. But by the time Ross interviewed her, Pizzey was living in a hostel for the homeless in West London, having left behind, in order, a second husband, a career as a writer of bodice-ripping novels, and substantial debts. She was 58.

Read: The hazards of writing while female

Four years later, Dina Rabinovitch of The Guardian found Pizzey poised to release online a book about women’s violence, having failed to find a mainstream publisher. Pizzey was now thoroughly outside the feminist mainstream. Rabinovitch wrote that it came “as a shock to someone of my generation—we grew up hearing about the work she did for other women.” She was left wondering “if a man who’d done so much would be quite so alone.” By 2009, the break was complete. Pizzey wrote for the Daily Mail that she had realized feminism was “a lie” and that “women and men are both capable of extraordinary cruelty … We must stop demonising men and start healing the rift that feminism has created between men and women.”

Pizzey is now an advocate for the men’s-rights movement, serving as editor at large of the anti-feminist website A Voice for Men. (The editor of the site, Paul Elam, once vowed that he would never deliver a guilty verdict as a juror in a rape trial, no matter what the evidence was, because the court system has been corrupted by our “false rape culture.”) Her 2011 autobiography, This Way to the Revolution, talks in heartbreaking detail about women who were beaten savagely by their partners. She knew several who went back to an abusive partner—and were killed as a result. So how does a woman go from founding England’s first refuge for domestic-violence victims to hanging out with men’s-rights activists?