Before the Women’s Liberation Movement emerged in Britain in the 1970s, domestic abuse was not on the national agenda. Intimate partner violence was treated as outside the proper scope of legal and political intervention, and police would rarely engage in ‘domestic’ disputes. In this paper, I take the anti-domestic abuse movement in Bristol, UK, as an illustrative case in successful society-led agenda setting. For the first time, I use extensive archival research, including policy documents, personal letters, and conference minutes, directly from the Bristol Women’s Library. As I show, the movement in Bristol began without state funding or resources – and even in properties that were criminalised. As the decade wore on, however, anti-domestic abuse became a decidedly mainstream position. How did this under-resourced, under-staffed, and criminalised movement manage to take domestic abuse from a marginal to mainstream issue? In this paper, I ask: how did civil society organisations place domestic abuse at the heart of the political agenda? What was the role of policy coalitions in the shifting salience of intimate partner justice? And how did legislation provide the tools for domestic abuse to be treated as a matter of public, rather than private, concern?