Editorial

Abstract

<p>Our second issue of 2020 arrives in very strange times and we wish our reader shealth and well-being in the face of a global pandemic. We extend particular thanks to the indefatigable Annalisa Giudici for helping us to produce this issue in this very challenging environment.</p>This issue begins with an important cluster of articles exploring historiogra-phies of domestic violence. Zora Simic, Catherine Kevin and Ann Curthoys explore how historians, activists and, in some cases, governments have told or might better tell this history of domestic violence in Australia. Zora Simic explains the intellectual and political origins of the very term domestic violence by telling the messy history of Erin Pizzey and Chiswick Women's Aid, a UK charity that supported women and children escaping domestic violence (now known as Refuge). Pizzey's refuge in Chiswick, west London, opened in 1971, is remembered as the first of its kind in the world and inspired a proliferation of shelters for women in the United States and Australia. Pizzey and Chiswick shaped feminist activism and feminist scholarship in both countries. However, her increasing conservatism also fed destructive stereotypes of female victims that have shaped and limited popular understandings of domestic violence since. This is a mixed and deeply generative history.</p>