During the late 1960's and early 1970's, women meeting in consciousness-raising (CR) groups became aware of the prevalence of two types of violence against women: rape and battering. The women in these CR groups developed a feminist analysis of the cause of this violence, and many of these women then began to open rape crisis centers and battered women's shelters. Some of these organizations have decided that their work is most effective if they employ only women. After explaining why some shelters want to employ only women, this paper discusses the Title VII Bona Fide Occupational Qualification (BFOQ) exception and then applies BFOQ doctrine to a number of potential justifications for a women-only employment policy. The paper concludes that most of these justifications either would not stand under existing BFOQ doctrine, or they establish a view of women that could be harmful if adopted in other employment contexts. The author uses feminist theory to craft a BFOQ exception that would enable women's shelters to employ only women, using a rationale that would not harm women if used in a different context. Shelters that wish to pursue a women-only employment policy can use MacKinnon's inequality approach by pointing to power difference as the relevant difference between the sexes. The shelters must then show that this difference is necessary, given the "essence" or primary function of the shelter. They can do so if the primary function of the shelter involves developing a women's community that regularly engages in critical consciousness raising and collective action to end male violence. 243 footnotes