Jenny Smith will never forget the phone call that saved her life. It was her second attempt after finding herself incapable of speech the first time. Trying again a few days later, she managed a few gasped words: "I'm a battered wife, can you help me?"

After being ignored by a doctor and a psychiatrist and told to go home and make peace with her husband by a priest, this time a woman's calm, soft voice, said: "Can you make your way here? We are in Chiswick, 2 Belmont Terrace. Can you get here? Just try to get here."

It was May 1973, there was no law against marital rape in the UK, lone women could not apply for a mortgage, and domestic violence was rarely mentioned. Smith had endured two years of violence from her mentally unstable husband, including vicious beatings, knifings, burns, bites and an attempted drowning. Within 48 hours of that call, with the help of a neighbour, she had left her home in Hackney, east London, and was standing outside an ordinary terraced house in west London – her seven-month-old daughter in one arm, her 23-month-old at her side.

When the door swung open she was enveloped in a woman's embrace. "Come in, love," she said. "You're safe now." As she stepped over the threshold, Smith unwittingly became a small part of feminist history: one of the first women to be given sanctuary in the world's first women's refuge.