What Price Accommodation? An Exploration of One Woman's Struggle to Sustain Privilege While Receiving an Old Age Pension

Abstract

According to recent literature on privilege and oppression, system-wide structures of class, race, and gender inequality are sustained at both the macro- and microlevel of society simultaneously. As an analysis of the microlevel process of how privilege might be sustained, using one case study from archives of the Luella Hannan Memorial Foundation, this article documents how the process of receiving aid might seemingly take privilege away from older, formally privileged women, and how individual aid recipients might resist this lack of power or privilege. Overall, this case highlights the dynamic nature of an individual's privilege, the process by which privilege is pursued and sustained at the microlevel, and the different types of privilege (e.g., economic or social, institutionally sanctioned or personal, macro or micro) that an individual might pursue in varying circumstances.