Shelter in a Storm

Casey Ready combines the personal and the political to ask: What is neoliberalism? How does it harm women? And what can be done about it?

Her book looks at how three YWCA women’s shelters in Ontario were affected by the neoliberal policies of Mike Harris’s Progressive Conservative government and the subsequent “new-neoliberal” policies of Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government. In particular, it focuses on how the Liberal government built upon its predecessors’ neoliberal policies to try to control the shelters’ organizational structures and services, and even to neutralize the language used to describe violence against women.

Drawing on interviews with forty-one shelter staff, clients, volunteers, and activists, Shelter in a Storm exposes the dangers for women that are embedded in neoliberal policies and reveals the value of revitalizing feminism to counteract this powerful ideology.