Women’s centres and Women’s shelters
Contents
Women’s centres |
Women’s shelters |
Further reading
Women’s centres
As early as in the 1960s, feminist women’s organizations in the United States and in Great Britain acquired assembly
halls that were available only for women. It is assumed that the first British women’s centre was the London Women’s Liberation Workshop,
which opened in 1969. Similar centres were later organized, in other British cities and in Germany and the Netherlands.
The women’s centres, where meetings and cultural activities could be arranged and where encounters could take place also with
"unorganized" women, became a model for the Nordic women’s movement. Denmark and Norway were ahead of Sweden,
which opened its first women’s centre in Gothenburg. Kvinnocentrum, formed in Gothenburg in 1975, was a group of women’s
organizations independent of party politics, whose goal was to acquire a house of their own. In 1978,
the municipality of Gothenburg decided to pay the rent for a former pharmacy for its use as a women’s centre.
The building was restored by the women themselves and, as a result, courses for women in restoration continued to be arranged.
The courses, in their turn, led to the foundation of Kvinnofolkhögskolan (a folk high school for women) - the first of its kind in Sweden.
In 1979, a women’s house was opened in Stockholm. Women’s houses functioned as multi-activity centres for the various women’s groups’
activities. In Norrköping a women’s house opened in 1982. Women’s activists in Umeå occupied a house for three months in 1983; as a
result of this action they received a big apartment from the local authority, and a few years later, a women’s house.
Women’s shelters
As a result of the debate on the sexual crime commission (see the section Personal/Political) more attention than before was given to
crimes of rape. Also other expressions of violence against women were brought into focus. Since the early 1970s, there were emergency centres
for raped and abused women in the United States and Great Britain, and many were calling for similar establishments in Sweden.
Gothenburg was the first Swedish city to introduce this kind of centre when the newly opened Kvinnohuset started a telephone hotline in 1978.
Kvinnohusgruppen was formed in Stockholm in1976 on the initiative of lesbian feminists - Group 8, SKV and other organizations joined in afterwards.
A few years later there was a conflict in the group between those who wanted a house for feminist groups and others who argued that the emphasis
should be on emergency duty for abused women. The group broke up at the end of 1978 and some of the women formed the association Alla kvinnors hus,
AKH. AKH was supported by the local authority, which let them use a building and was paying the rent on the condition that AKH would organize a
telephone hotline and provide abused women with overnight apartments. The activity started in 1980 and continues to this day.
Telephone hotline at Kvinnohuset in Gothenburg.
Kvinnohuset, Gamlestadstorget, Gothenburg
Annual report 1978-79, Kvinnocentrum, Gothenburg, Göteborg.
Further reading
Kvinnofolkhögskolan
Alla kvinnors hus
Roks - the national organisation for women's and girls' shelters in Sweden
Sveriges kvinnojourers riksförbund
Kvinnofridslinjen
