Zimmer played key role in first shelter
Jan knew she had to leave. It was 1973 and her husband spent most days drinking and seething with rage.
One afternoon, he smacked her on the back of the head, knocking her to the floor and nearly cracking her skull on a wall.
When the police arrived, he was sitting in his chair watching TV as though nothing had happened. Officers questioned him, then Jan, then him again. She remembers clearly what they said to her next.
“They said, ‘You behave yourself,”’ recalls Jan, who asked that her last name be withheld to protect her children’s identities.
“They couldn’t do anything more ... It was a ‘he said, she said.”’
In a time when women were expected to keep the peace at home, the 29-year-old had tried everything to avoid her husband’s temper. Her parents were dead and his family expected the couple to work out their marital problems.
She had no money of her own and no idea how to start over.
Jan knew she had to leave - but she had nowhere to go.
In the early 1970s, domestic violence was still a problem with no name — a private reality for many women, but not an issue considered the business of government or police. It was in this setting that a group of young feminists set about opening the first shelter for abused women and children in Canada.
The founders of Toronto’s Interval House had to fight for everything they gained and laid the groundwork for the problem of violence against women to be brought to light. Today, Canada has hundreds of shelters that give women a chance to escape abusive relationships.
And it all began with a handscrawled note on a wall.
Lynn Zimmer, now the executive director of the Peterborough Haliburton YWCA, was an idealistic 24-year-old who had worked as a reporter for the women’s page of
The Peterborough Examiner. She had also spent a depressing year in law school, where a professor would entertain his mostly male students with “funny” sex assault cases.
In the summer of 1972, she found herself at loose ends in Toronto and began volunteering at Women’s Place, a run-down house on Dupont Street.
Feminists had formed centres like Women’s Place across Canada. They were meant to be locations for political organizing, but to the surprise of activists, women who had been beaten or raped started showing up asking for help.
They had no jobs, no income and needed an address before they could apply for welfare.
Zimmer discovered there was one shelter that could take families in Toronto, but it had originally been designed for veterans.
“You had to line up to get a bar of soap,” she recalls. “For us, that was the cutoff point.”
So, Zimmer tacked a note on the wall of Women’s Place, asking anyone who was interested in creating a women’s crisis shelter to come to a meeting.
Darlene Lawson saw Zimmer’s sign and wanted to help.
The 23-year-old had been inspired by feminist writing and activism and she understood that changes were needed to put women on equal footing with men.
“I wanted to be a part of making those changes,” she says.
At their first meeting, Lawson, Zimmer and several other women sat around a table. They included Billie Stone, a 34-year-old mother who worked in an addictions centre and Martha Ireland, a 21-year-old who was about to enter the fourth year of a degree she hated.
The group of 11 founders also includes Chris Poulter, Suzanne Alexanderson, Katherine Hanson, Maggie Longdon, Marilyn Tinsley, Joice Guspie and Elizabeth Johnson.
Their idea started to take shape. The shelter needed to feel like a home, with healthy meals and shared chores. It would be a “stepping off” place for women to begin the next chapter of their lives.
“There never had been a place like this,” says Lawson. “We learned everything as we went.”
They had no experience with finding space or raising funds, but they eventually secured a grant from a federal government program focused on youth employment. By January 1973, they were each earning a salary of $100 a week minus deductions.
“It’s the whole thing about being young and foolish,” says Ireland. “You don’t know that you shouldn’t try.”
United Way chipped in $1,200 for first and last month’s rent on a large house at 173 Spadina Rd. in the Annex area of Toronto. The women had to become amateur painters and contractors, and they needed everything.
“We would drive through Forest Hill and Rosedale on garbage night and get furniture that people had put out,” recalls Lawson with a chuckle, referring to affluent neighbourhoods.
Finally, the founders all chipped in $5 to stock the kitchen with healthy food.
On April 1, 1973, Interval House opened its doors.
“They’re gone”
Jan’s husband had slapped her across the face more times than she could count. He’d threatened to break their four-year-old son’s legs. He’d threatened to kill her.
After he smacked her on the back of the head that day, she dizzily stumbled to her feet.
“It’s over. Done,” she remembers sputtering.
She called a marriage counsellor, who told her about a new place called Interval House. She arranged to become a resident, but had to wait to make her escape.
Her husband was watching her. After she told him it was over, he stayed home every day for a month.
Finally, on April 11, 1973, he gave in to the urge to go out for a drink.
Jan’s heart pounded as she called the taxi. When it arrived and she began frantically throwing belongings into the trunk, her son stood in the front room and cried.
“He was picking up on my panic,” she says. “I was terrified (my husband) was going to come walking in the door.”
She calmed him down and strapped him in a seat next to his two-year-old sister. As the taxi pulled away, she remembered she had left some family photographs on the counter.
“That’s all right,” she recalls thinking. “They’re gone.”
As Jan walked through the front door of Interval House, she felt an immediate wave of relief wash over her and her children.
They moved into a spacious room on the second floor with a sunroom attached. Her daughter still remembers a Fisher Price school house she played with.
Her son was finally able to stop worrying about his mom.
“There was no fighting anymore,” she says.
During the two months she stayed there, she only got a couple hours of sleep every night. For the first time, she had someone to talk to about how she had been treated.
“I would talk and I would talk and I would talk,” she remembers. “I was talking their ear off. They said that’s what they’re there for.”
The founders of Interval House were shocked by what residents told them.
“From the very beginning, every woman who came to us was experiencing some kind of horrendous level of physical and emotional violence,” says Zimmer.