Lady versus Low Creature: Old Roots of Current Attitudes toward Homeless Women

Abstract

In January 1989 the Homeless Women's Rights Network, an advocacy group organized to respond to the fearsome conditions in the New York City shelters for single homeless women, issued a report documenting the forms of discrimination and abuse faced by the residents of two notorious shelters in Brooklyn.' Two of the report's charges in particular exemplify issues that are unique to women's homelessness-historically as well as today-and thus make it different from that of men. The first involves sexual abuse. The homeless women reported that shelter staff paid residents for sex and had sex with them in dormitories. Residents were also extremely vulnerable to rape and assault by men in the surrounding neighborhoods, not least because shelter staff refused to let women in after curfew and frequently threw them out onto the streets at night. Second, the shelter system created obstacles that helped prevent women from becoming employed. One such obstacle was that women who were trying to find jobs were not provided with the means to obtain appropriate, presentable clothing. As a result they often wound up postponing job interviews because they felt they could not dress properly. While the report's authors, and commentators on homelessness generally, focus on the immediate need to remedy these and other abuses, it is also valuable to look at them from a historical perspective. The women described by the investigators could have been speaking a hundred years ago, raising much the same issues. For centuries, the experience of homeless women has been shaped not only by the factors that also made men homeless, but by issues that are central to the lives of all women, especially those clustering around sexuality. Although much research has been done and many books have been written about homeless men, hardly any works treat homeless women as a group in themselves; they have generally been assimilated into the study of men and subsumed into generalizations based on that study. But two themes distinguish female homelessness: like other women, those who were homeless have always had more difficulty than men in earning a living; and they have been particularly victimized by ideologies about women. While men have been outcasts, and more often than women, not only have they had more options, but-as is still true today-the male outsider has been defined in terms of work, and the female in terms of sexuality. That is, if a woman did not belong to a family or live within some other restrictive social context (such as a convent), her sexuality was seen as anarchic and threatening. At the same time sexuality was often the instrument of her economic survival-sometimes as a wise woman or midwife, but most often as a prostitute. Although the history of homeless women is intertwined with that of two other venerable social phenomena not related to sex-begging and vagabondage-it is also closely related to one activity men generally do not share: prostitution, an option almost always open to a destitute woman. Although beggars, vagabonds, and prostitutes all evoke in the members of settled society similar mixtures of fear, envy, loathing, attraction, and moral disapproval, the element of sexuality and the mystery associated with it have entered into the public perception of homeless women and made them seem special in a way that has not been true for men. The basic problem is one of category. Whereas a homeless man fits comfortably into a variety of categories (hobo, tramp, bum, vagrant), a homeless woman evokes intense discomfort. Women have always been defined so entirely in terms of whom they belong to that no category exists for a woman without family or home. If one thinks of society as a pattern of social forms that create categories into which its members fit, such a woman must be marginal, in the sense that because she fits into the pattern nowhere she has to exist at its edge. According to Mary Douglas, Danger lies in transitional [that is, marginal] states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable. A person who exists at the margin is therefore automatically regarded as dangerous and unreliable?