‘The irons of their fetters have eaten into their souls’: nineteenth-century feminist strategies to get our bodies onto the political agenda Catherine E u le r

In 1971, the year the first women’s refuge opened in England, a group of women in West Yorkshire made what was for them a startling discovery. They were ‘astounded’ to learn that nineteenth-century feminists had even been interested in violence against women, though less astounded that they had campaigned against it:

This then enabled us to ask questions about where did all that knowledge go? How are relationships of power structured with regard to ideas that matter? The disappearance of that knowledge felt to us, at that time, extreme. It left us all with a feeling that to keep it in the public domain we must keep working. That if we were to stop, this knowledge might disappear again.1