In 1971 Erin Pizzey set up the world s first refuge for battered women and their children. 40 years later, she describes the battles she was forced to fight: against the establishment, the church, the courts, and not least, the women s movement. She also describes her own troubled childhood, her discovery of feminism and her political activism, including her coinage of an abiding epithet for Margaret Thatcher: Milk Snatcher