My cousin’s first wife, Sharon Rice Vaughan, who has been killed in a road accident aged 73 while on holiday in Cuba, was the co-founder of the first refuge in the US for women and children escaping domestic violence.
She grew up in the “twin cities” of Minneapolis and St Paul, Minnesota, the daughter of Mary Wyvell, a university professor of English, and Philip Rice, a radio technician. She attended the University high school in Minneapolis, and in 1959, barely 18, met Peter Vaughan (later a theatre critic) while on holiday.
They married and travelled to London, where Sharon taught in a primary school in Deptford, south-east London, while Peter studied at the London School of Economics. In the early 1960s, now with a daughter, Rachel, they returned to the US, where their sons, Tom and Jeremy, were born. The marriage ended in 1970, after which Sharon resumed her education, gaining a master’s from the University of Minnesota.
In 1972, she became a co-founder of a collective, Women’s Advocates, initially a legal helpline for women. Soon, they found “all kinds of women calling and wanting a place to stay”. Sharon explained: “Women know what they want. They just can’t get the resources … so that’s how the shelter began.”
Initially, that “shelter” was members’ homes. Visitors to Sharon’s house in those early days were met with a wonderful chaos of Sharon’s own three children, along with any number of other women and children seeking refuge. Then, in 1974, Women’s Advocates bought a property in St Paul, the US’s first such shelter. Since then, it has provided services – emergency accommodation, food, counselling and other support and advice – for more than 38,000 women and children.
In 1985, Sharon began teaching at the Minnesota Metropolitan State University, where, in 1994, she created its community violence prevention programme. In 1987, she co-produced Breaking the Silence: Voices of Battered Women, an 11-part documentary for the University of Minnesota public radio station. Sharon was by now an authority on violence against women, travelling widely in that capacity, including being a delegate to the UN fourth world conference on women in Beijing in 1995.
In 2005 she took a sabbatical to care for her daughter, Rachel, who was recovering from heart surgery in London, and completed a PhD from Manchester University: Social Change Implications of Battered Women’s Stories: A Narrative Approach – considering how women’s stories “relate to a process of social change that moves from the ‘acceptance’ of battering to one of contest or rejection”.
Sharon is survived by Tom and Jeremy, her sisters, Mary and Margaret, and brother, Robert. Rachel died in 2006.
