A few years later, in the early eighties, United Way also became enthusiastic about giving money to Transition House, but the charity insisted on seeing the shelter. This caused a crisis—how could the women bring strangers, possibly male strangers, into the house without revealing its location?—until someone came up with a solution. The United Way representatives would be picked up in Central Square, blindfolded, and driven around for a while to confuse them. Their blindfolds would be taken off once they were inside the house, and put on again before they left. United Way was so determined to fund Transition House that it agreed to these peculiar conditions—although, decades later, one of its representatives admitted to the staff that the moment he had looked out of one of the windows he knew exactly where he was, but, not wanting to upset his hosts, he hadn’t mentioned it.

Both the government and United Way required paperwork detailing the job titles and the structure of the organization, along with a board of directors. But the staff circumvented this by simply making it all up. On paper they had a board and so on, but in reality they continued with the collective just as before.

Liz grew up in an Irish Catholic family in Dorchester. She used to hang out in Harvard Square with her older sisters, and when she was fourteen, in 1971, she met a Palestinian boy there who was sixteen and had arrived in the country a year or so before. They started dating, and she was crazy about him: he was charming, he was handsome, he was funny and sweet. Everybody liked him. Right from the start, he was jealous—he didn’t want her even looking at anyone else, and if he thought she was he beat her up—but she thought it meant he loved her.

In August, 1976, the year it opened, Transition House helped to organize a march in Boston in support of battered women. Photograph by Ellen Shub

She got pregnant when she was fifteen and dropped out of her Catholic school, which didn’t let pregnant girls stay. She had planned to give the baby up for adoption, but at the last minute she couldn’t go through with it and kept the baby, a boy, and she and the father got married. They had a second son three years later.

Liz had always wanted to be a therapist—when she was a child, she used to make appointments for her stuffed animals and bring them in for sessions—but her husband wouldn’t allow her to go to school. He called her from work every morning at eleven o’clock, and she had to be home. She wasn’t allowed to leave the house without his permission; he picked out all her clothes. Sometimes he would hit her because the house wasn’t clean enough. He wasn’t ashamed of beating her up—to him, it was normal. People saw him shout at her, but nobody said anything, and Liz couldn’t speak up for herself, because she was agonizingly shy. Sometimes she thought about running away, but it seemed too hard. “You don’t just leave your spouse—you leave your neighborhood, your friends, the kids get uprooted,” she says. “And he had this wonderful side to him, that’s the part that keeps you there, and then you have to leave it all because you might end up dead.”

When she was twenty-three, she got her husband’s permission to take a women’s self-defense class, and one of the women in the class told the others about Transition House. After the class, someone suggested that they all go to a lesbian club in Boston. Liz went along, but felt so shy that she got very drunk. When she got home, she told her husband that he shouldn’t mind her having gone to the club, because it was all women, but he locked her and the children in a room and beat her and ripped her clothes in front of them. This time, she remembered the woman’s story and thought, I am not trapped after all—there’s a place I can go. The next day, she called Transition House and took her sons and left for good.

Moving to Transition House in 1980 was moving to a different world. Women there talked about battering as an evil all women had to fight, not just some weird, awful thing that had happened to Liz. They helped her go to court and take out a restraining order, and persuaded her to withdraw money from the bank. She started answering the hotline and accompanying other women to court. There were the long meetings and the fights, but she loved it all. While she was at Transition House, she came out as a lesbian. After a couple of months, she moved in briefly with one of the women on staff, whose partner had two boys the same age as hers. She found jobs to support herself—cleaning houses, answering phones at a law office. She went back to school so that she could eventually become a therapist. For a while, she was homeless—she sent her kids to live with family and she stayed with friends, or slept in her Volkswagen Bug.

Seven years after she left her husband, he killed himself. In the aftermath, she and her kids were a mess. Then, about a year later, she met a woman who made her kids laugh again. Liz was so glad to see them warming to someone new that for the moment it was all she cared about. She thought, At last, here is someone for my kids.

Before long, the woman started beating her. But even though it was happening, and even though it had happened to her before, she could not believe it, because her partner was a woman. Liz had spent years educating people about domestic violence and counselling battered women, and here she was going through it all over again in her own house. She kept thinking, She’s a woman, she’s going to realize how bad this is. She did not. But Liz stayed with her for five years. After Liz finally left, she started volunteering at the recently formed Network for Battered Lesbians in Boston, and she discovered that although there were many other women in her situation, the battered women’s movement wasn’t talking about it.

At Transition House, everyone believed that battering was a result of male domination in a sexist culture, so the idea that women battered other women was incomprehensible, and therefore ignored. It wasn’t that they had rigid ideas about what it meant to be a woman—a trans woman had come to stay in the shelter while Liz was there, in the early eighties, and nobody had thought twice about it (although the woman made it so clear that she thought both feminism and her fellow-residents were stupid that nobody much liked her). No, it was the idea of violent women that was impossible to understand.

Around the time that Liz was emerging from her relationship, there was a lesbian couple working at the shelter who would get into terrible fights, but no one thought of it as domestic violence. “One of the women came in with bruises because her partner was throwing rocks at her on the beach at P-town, but we didn’t think this was battering, because women don’t do that to each other,” Carole Sousa says. “We thought they were just having a fight and it got out of hand.” Soon afterward, the shelter hired a lesbian who said that she had been in a violent relationship, but still nobody could believe it. “She would argue with us, but there was a lot of denial,” Sousa says. “People’s response, including mine, was, How could that be? It threw out the window everything we knew. It just didn’t make sense.”