There have been suggestions that shelters can be categorized by their ideological differences and that their ideologies predict their organizational structures. Widely accepted principles of organizational theory predict that older shelters would have a different structure than newer shelters. A nationwide survey of 111 shelters provided the data for this study. Feminist versus other ideologies were associated with a distinctive pattern of priorities for the shelters. Organizational age predicted the structure of women's shelters more powerfully than did ideological differences among shelters; even interactions between ideology and age were unimportant. Thus the findings appear to support organizational theory and to contradict assumptions that ideology can importantly influence structural development. 1 table, 32 references.