A Women's Self-Help Network as a Response to Service Needs in the Suburbs

Abstract

The failure of urban researchers to make women's daily lives a topic for serious investigation hampers efforts to plan communities responsive to women's changing life-styles. There is a crucial lack of studies exploring women's diverse concerns and ways of dealing with unmet needs for services. What explanations are offered for the lack of research on urban and suburban women? As Lofland so perceptively argued, women are just there in urban studies-in the background like furniture or the unobtrusive butler in an English murder mystery.' This thereness is attributable to three factors. First, the community emphasis of urban studies leads researchers to study ethnic or working-class communities in which the woman's role is home-centered, segregated, and circumscribed. Since her overt participation in the community's public life is usually limited, her life is not readily visible, especially to the male researcher. His limited opportunity to observe and study women's lives and activities, then, is a second explanation for the lack of studies. A third reason for the paucity of studies on women in cities and suburbs is that government and foundation funding is largely allocated to the study of problems, particularly those associated with social disorganization and crime.2 In these studies, the focus tends to be on men, although