Women

Homeless women in the United States were invisible throughout most of the twentieth century. In its early decades, they were a minor, little-noted presence in the hobo camps, skid rows, and missions that sheltered the enormous variety of destitute people who scraped by on the margins of U.S. society. They remained largely unacknowledged in the chronicles of Depression-era homelessness; and as sociologist Peter Rossi (1989) notes, “What few homeless women there were in the 1950s and 1960s must have kept out of sight” (p. 35). But in the 1970s and 1980s, as homelessness overflowed the boundaries of marginal neighborhoods and revealed the diversity of late-twentieth-century poverty, homeless women became a visible fact of urban life. The emblematic figure was the “shopping-bag lady”—an elderly, unkempt, deranged, and isolated woman who carried her possessions in filthy shopping bags rumored to conceal bank books that recorded millions in secret wealth. Most were seen as both repulsive and mysterious, beyond rationality, unknowable. Writings and photographic essays on homeless women in the 1980s began to demystify shoppingbag women, documenting their struggles to meet basic survival needs while exploring the fascination they exerted, particularly in relation to a feminist consciousness of women's unresolved ambivalence about power and vulnerability.

While popular culture and the feminist gaze were focused on the shopping bag lady, urban bureaucracies were documenting astonishing increases in other kinds of female homelessness. Younger women with children, disproportionately women of color, appeared in rapidly growing numbers as candidates for shelter, eventually eclipsing older women both in numbers and in the public imagination of homelessness. They were part of a surge in homelessness that reflected the global economic changes reshaping the U.S. industrial structure and labor markets through deindustrialization and the expansion of urban service economies. In many cities, the resulting transformation of local housing markets produced both gentrification and homelessness. In the context of the neoliberal policies that dismantled state-supported safety nets and of ongoing changes in family and household forms, these processes have expanded the proportion of people in poverty, shunting many impoverished men to the margins of the labor force, into shadow work (selling plasma or drugs, scavenging) or incarceration, while “feminizing” household poverty and concentrating its effects in communities of color. Both men and women have been affected, but gender (along with race) has mattered in how they have experienced poverty and in what pathways they took from poverty to homelessness.