Sometimes the meetings were not so
much angry as excruciatingly dull. After
a while, the less committed stopped com-
ing; others coped as best they could. Gail
Sullivan started making an intricate baby
quilt for her niece. “It was the only thing
that kept me sane in those endless meet-
ings,” she says. “I realized early on that
if I didn’t have something to do with my
hands I was going to scream.”
It wasn’t long after the second move
before it became clear that it would be
impossible to cover expenses with the
small checks that women sent in. How
could they find a more reliable source
of money without jeopardizing their in-
dependence? The federal government
had begun awarding grants to fund jobs
for low-income people in public service;
the shelter figured that accepting one
wouldn’t be too compromising, and in
1978 it received money to pay for two
salaries of nine thousand dollars a year.
“I was officially one of the two employ-
ees,” Sullivan says, “but we split each of
the two salaries in half so it actually em-
ployed four people, because we thought,
Who needs nine thousand a year? It
didn’t occur to me until the end of the
year that I had a forty-five-hundred-dol-
lar income and a tax bill for nine thou-
sand. I don’t remember what we did—
we worked it out.”
A few years later, in the early eight-
ies, United Way also became enthusi-
astic about giving money to Transition
House, but the charity insisted on see-
ing 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, blind-
folded, 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 admit-
ted 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 orga-
nization, along with a board of direc-
tors. 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.L
iz grew up in an Irish Catholic fam-
ily 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 jeal-
ous—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.
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 adop-
tion, 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 ther-
apist—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 nor-
mal. 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