by Alexandria Zabjek
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY PRESS
2023/$27.99/160 pp.
The Alberta Council of Women’s Shelters (ACWS) has released a book that tells the story of the women’s shelter movement in Alberta. Written by Alexandra Zabjek, We Need to Do This explores the building of this movement by the pragmatic Prairie feminists who opened the first shelters in the 1970s and who, over the next decades, forged a powerful institutional voice in the ACWS.
Zabjek, a storyteller with the soul of a social historian, brings us into the swirl of late-20th-century feminist politics through interviews with these Alberta pioneers. As she explains, the book came about because current ACWS president Jan Reimer recognized that “the trailblazers were aging and… wanted to ensure that their stories were preserved.”
Some of the key actors in Alberta’s movement might resist my unapologetic labelling of this important political work as feminist. Neither the formidable “church lady” Ardis Beaudry, one of the founding mothers of the Edmonton Women’s Emergency Overnight Shelter in 1970, nor Ruth Scalp Lock, who established Alberta’s first off-reserve shelter for Indigenous women, now the Awo Taan Healing Lodge, would have seen their work as specifically feminist. Moreover, as Zabjek emphasizes, many of the avowedly feminist women who sought to establish the first Alberta refuges for abused women had to, by necessity, downplay the feminist thrust of this work to gain the support of town councillors, provincial politicians and funders. They had to deftly reassure their communities that they were not “man haters” intent on breaking up families, while at the same time bringing to light the widespread problem of domestic violence, a problem that is, as Zabjek emphasizes, deeply rooted in misogyny as well as in racism and colonialism.
Zabjek examines the relentless work from church basements and run-down suburban duplexes that led to the building of a provincial network of women’s shelters in the ACWS. Alberta’s movement, as she emphasizes, had several distinctive features. First, activists had a roll-up-your-sleeves approach that downplayed ideology in the service of sustaining a progressive social movement in a traditionally conserv-ative province. Second, the struggles of Indigenous leaders in the movement led to the building of strong coalitions and Indigenous-focused programming, using Elders and spirituality to confront intergenerational trauma and support the entire family. As Zabjek writes, “For Indigenous women like Ruth Scalp Lock, the fight against family violence had to be holistic, and had to include help for men who abuse their partners.” In turn, and even in the face of significant divisions among feminists, Alberta’s shelters were early innovators in the field of programming for abusive men. Finally, under the leadership of ACWS, Alberta’s movement has effectively marshalled data to influence public policy.
Zabjek has crafted a highly readable book that is both engaging and scholarly. It should find its way onto the bookshelves of anyone interested in social history in Alberta, as well as onto reading lists in gender studies, sociology and political science. It is part of a genre seeking to document Canada’s women’s movement and is in conversation with books such as Margo Goodhand’s excellent Runaway Wives and Rogue Feminists: The Origins of the Women’s Shelter Movement in Canada.
Critically, Zabjek is asking us to consider how to sustain this necessary movement. As Reimer repeatedly reminds Albertans when ACWS releases its yearly data, shelters have not seen funding increases since 2015, and are still turning away thousands of women and children. While the trailblazers of this movement broke the silence on domestic violence, there is sadly still much work to do.
Lise Gotell is a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta.
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