Elaine S Abelson. Feminist Studies. Volume 29, Issue 1, Spring 2003.
In the late-twentieth century homelessness emerged as a symbol of profound malaise in the United States. The sudden appearance of a homeless population on city streets across the country beginning in the late 19705 led to a political struggle about public order as well as the meaning and uses of urban space. Overlapping images of bag ladies, armories filled with lost men, and women with children setting up housekeeping in motels and “welfare hotels” were common referents of urban decay. A series of editorials in the New York Times likened the situation to Calcutta.
Historical memory is short and we have forgotten (if we ever knew) that homelessness has been a recurrent problem in the United States. Although both the severity and visibility of homelessness have fluctuated in the past three hundred years, only with the back-to-back depressions of the 1870s and 1890s did the modem understanding of homelessness emerge in conjunction with industrial capitalism and urban growth, economic cycles, wage dependency, immigration, and unemployment. The homeless man—the tramp, the hobo, the vagrant—became, alternately, the embodiment of rugged American individualism and a metaphor for social disorder. In the twentieth century, Skid Row, too, presented a male model; and prior to the depression of the 1930s, the Salvation Army and a few private charities combined with public sources of relief to provide whatever minimal care was necessary in flowery districts across the country.
How do women fit into this picture? Uneasily. Poverty is gendered in specific ways at different times, and although long-term unemployment produced severe hardship for everyone, women and men have had diverse experiences. While stories of dissolute females and the unfortunate poor had wide currency in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the female drifter remained an anomaly. Women, unlike men, have never been fully detached from family, domestic life, and a quasi-dependent role. Whatever the reality of their individual situations, women have been bound to the home by ideology, moral strictures, and idealized notions about motherhood and the family.
This article interrogates a new form of homelessness that appeared suddenly with the onset of the Great Depression. It examines the experience and representation of homeless urban women from the early months of 1930, when the depression began to have a visible economic and social impact in U.S. cities, through 1934 when New Deal programs and funding, particularly the Federal Emergency Relief Act (FERA) of May 1933, broke with the old tradition of poor laws and, for the first time, extended home relief to “unattached” women and men. I locate this homelessness not among the chronically dispossessed but among women who, while white and nominally middle class, lost jobs, savings, and often their homes and were cast into a particular narrative framework called the “New Poor.”
To think of the early years of the economic disaster in terms of women is to imagine not only a different historical reality but also to glimpse the first significant expression of the marginal women who exemplified the homeless crisis only a decade ago. Women constituted more than 25 percent of the total labor force in the United States in the 19305—over ten million women were working out of the home at the beginning of the decade, and over three million of them were married. They lost jobs at a higher rate than did men in the early years of the collapse, were often unable to find other sources of income, and were routinely discriminated against in public employment. Women’s increasingly prominent yet largely unrecognized role in the workforce by 1930 is the key to understanding both their homelessness and the lack of initial concern by emergency work and relief organizations on the local and national level.
Unlike most histories of the Great Depression, which either focus primarily on Franklin D. Roosevelt and New Deal social policy or take radical politics, ethnic accommodation, and labor unrest as their lead, this article is engaged with issues raised by historians of women who have assessed the gendered character of public policy, welfare reform, and the assumptions behind the family wage. But even in this literature, homeless women have been treated only incidentally. Whether in scholarly or popular renditions of the Great Depression, homelessness has been understood narrowly as the displaced men who thronged the urban centers or the travail of the hundreds of thousands of transients—individuals and entire families—who, forced from their homes, moved restlessly across the country seeking work or relief.
This essay challenges the silences by posing three sets of questions that together suggest a different historiographic approach. First, what were the conditions that led to the surge in female homelessness between 1930 and 1934? Second, what were the factors that determined representations of the homeless population and shaped social policy? Was it the huge disparity in numbers between homeless men and women? Was it the negative social consequences of male versus female unemployment? Or was it the cultural lag between old myths and new realities—the ingrained, common understanding that defined the problem of unemployment as male? Third, how did large cities, particularly New York City, view the homeless population. What gendered decisions did officials make? How and to what extent did unconscious motivations and entrenched gender ideology work together to become crucial elements of both representation and public policy? Exploring these questions illuminates the constant intersections and crossovers between structural changes and cultural processes and underscores the interplay of forces that fed into the official silence about the homeless woman.
The situation of Belle Jones provides a typical scenario of the new dimensions and representations of female white-collar homelessness. The subject of one segment of a six-part series entitled “The Forgotten Woman,” which appeared in the New York World-Telegram in October 1933, Belle was reported to be “one of the uncounted thousands of jobless/homeless women in New York” who came to the attention of the relief authorities only when she became severely depressed and required hospitalization. “She slipped back this week into the dream state of childhood,” a psychiatrist explained to reporters, “and the amazing thing is that there are not more.” This self-supporting “normal girl” had lost her white-collar job and the apartment she shared with three other young women and was unable to find any work after the Emergency Work Bureau ran out of money in the summer of 1932 and laid off thousands from made-work projects. Belle, who was described as “a proud girl who kept her chin up,” lived off the charity of relative s for a while and then doubled up with a series of friends, but, with overcrowding and an exhaustion of resources, she was ultimately “tossed into the street” along with thousands of other women and men.
Writing about the dire situation of this new class of “business girls,” reporters and social work professionals used similar language. As the trajectory from joblessness to homelessness became part of a familiar narrative, portrayals of women appear in starkly contradictory terms. On the one hand their positive individual, fiercely “American” qualities stand out; “their courage in the main is dauntless,” read one welfare report. They are “sturdy,” “proud,” “plucky,” “able to take it on the chin.” On the other hand, they are cast as patients, traumatized by the overwhelming shock of events and primary clients for therapeutic intervention. Seemingly unwilling to ask for help even in desperate situations, many of these women “disintegrate mentally and emotionally,” as did Belle Jones.
In a long article on homelessness entitled “30,000 Women Seen in Need of Winter Shelter,” the New York Herald Tribune used the nervous breakdown of a young typist who went months without work to demonstrate the heavy toll of economic uncertainty “on the nervous systems of its victims.” A study made for the Emergency Unemployment Relief Committee in New York City found that 18 percent of the women who applied to the Central Registration Bureau for the Homeless (CRB) were “near breakdown from worry.” “To the woman accustomed to a home and financial security,” the CRB director told relief investigators, “destitution is a serious mental hazard which is not made easier by the institutional life.” Responding in fear and panic to a once-unimaginable situation, neither these women nor those who observed them could assimilate the crisis into any existing frame of reference.
Men were similarly traumatized by the economic collapse and reluctant to appear helpless, but their mental state only rarely became a public issue. Representations of the unemployed man, particularly the white-collar worker, were generally optimistic, pointing not to a state of panic or the deterioration of the human spirit, but to a strong sense of individual responsibility and determination to provide for his family, even if it ultimately meant accepting relief. Men may have been shamed by their new dependency, but for social welfare agencies homeless men were a management problem; they were numbers. Women became gender issues above all.
Scattered contemporary references to the new faces of the homeless conform to the visual ideal of the American girl of the 1920s and are filled with simplistic allusions to class and more implicitly to race. In spite of obvious contradictions, the homeless woman was cast into a conventional narrative framework: young, single, female in peril. Her whiteness was an unquestioned category. The metaphor of the “white collar” symbolized the deserving Protestant middle class and was of overriding concern. The Salvation Army referred repeatedly to a white-collar problem and was careful to respect the privacy of the “shy, proud, new poor.” So conscious was the Army about the combined impact of joblessness and homelessness on this new clientele, which was “suffering inarticulately because of unfamiliarity with their present condition,” that it appointed a confidential counselor to deal with them. The Travelers’ Aid Society spoke of “higher types” who needed financial aid to get them on their feet and counseling to mend their broken spirits; even the Welfare Council in New York City planned for the future needs of a “new class of impoverished women.”
By 1931, Survey Magazine, the Social Workers Monthly Journal, could write of “Women at the Breaking Point,” “Ragged White Collars,” and the stigma for people who confront dire need for the first time. Fearful of both a mental health crisis and the breakdown of social mores, the CRB referred to the urgent problem of finding temporary residences for white-collar women who “were obviously of the type who would not consider accepting housing at shelters maintained under public auspices and [with] women who…were accustomed to this sort of housing.” The category “New Poor” was constructed within a context of race and gentility which conspicuously excluded the working poor and racial minorities—particularly African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans.
Contrary to popular images of homeless women, statistical data present a more varied picture. In most northern cities, the majority of these women were white if not exactly middle class, but in such cities as New Orleans and Chicago, many, at times 30 to 40 percent in the early 1930s, were African American. And even in New York and other northeastern cities where the Black population hovered below 5 percent, formal if not legal racial codes governed most areas of business, social life, and the patchwork of relief and charity organizations. In the Philadelphia Public Employment Office in 1932 and 1933, 68 percent of job orders for women specified “Whites Only,” and many Black working women, particularly waitresses and domestics, found themselves replaced by desperate white women willing to take steep wage cuts in order to get or keep a job.
In New York City, the vast majority of unemployed Black women were marginalized in separate unemployment offices in Harlem and immobilized by deep-seated racial and sexual stereotyping in the labor market. They could get work only sporadically and then as domestics under the most exploitative conditions and for wages that were insufficient even to maintain a single person. Black churches and church-related institutions, traditional sources of relief and support networks in the community, were overwhelmed, and although the municipal shelter had to accept everyone, racism was the norm in shelters across the city. The Welfare Council singled out Catholic and African American women as being particularly difficult to place. Just how many homeless women in New York City were African American is not known, but the economic situation in Harlem was bleak prior to the depression, and the number of Black women lacking shelter in the early 193os was undoubtedly substantial. If homeless women as a group were not readily visible, African American women were almost wholly invisible to the mostly white investigators.
Given the lack of data, its fragmentary and uneven character, and the different categories used from city to city, it is difficult to construct a coherent picture of the newly homeless woman during the Great Depression. As economic conditions rapidly deteriorated, a lack of knowledge and publicity about the desperate situation of a growing number of women was the norm, even as the numbers of women needing such basic necessities as food and shelter climbed from month to month. There were common elements, however, that enable us to locate these women in certain sectors of the economy. In the earliest years of the depression, 1930 and 1931, homeless women were likely to have been factory and service workers, domestics, garment workers, waitresses, and beauticians. But by the winters of 1931 and 1932, the second and third years of the depression, loss of a job was no longer a strictly bluecollar phenomenon. By 1932 white-collar and educated women—those who were accustomed “to regular employment and stable domicile”—had become the faces of the “New Poor,” and a good number of them were in shelters.
More than half of the women in the various surveys had never married; the others not living with husbands were divorced, deserted, separated, or claimed to be widowed. A great many seemed to have had dependent parents and siblings, a few had children, but most were thought to be single and unattached. All the women had been unemployed for long months, some for a year or more, had used up whatever savings and insurance they may have had, and could no longer call upon their informal networks of assistance. The executive director of the Jewish Welfare Society of Philadelphia, Dorothy Kahn, testified to a Senate committee investigating unemployment relief in late 1931 that “neighborliness has been stretched not only beyond its capacity but beyond the limits of human endurance.” Without resources, with eligibility for even emergency home relief restricted to families with dependent children until 1934, and racial discrimination widespread, homelessness was the inevitable outcome for many women. “Having an address is a luxury just now,” an unemployed college woman told a social worker in 1932.
Even in the 1920s, when the self-supporting woman symbolized emancipation, her wages were too low in most instances to carry her over an extended period of idleness. Many of the reports on the dire economic situation in the following decade focused on the “surprising fact” that a large percentage of the women had been financially independent and living on their own prior to the depression. A Woman’s Bureau survey of 1933 emphasized the causal and ultimately crucial link between the sexual division of labor and unemployment fluctuations, “The industries and occupations in which the variations are most extreme often are exactly those within which women workers must make their livelihood.” Almost 43 percent of the known unemployed in Washington, D.C., were said to be women. The Milwaukee Journal estimated that more than 60 percent of the “non-family” women who came to the attention of relief authorities in that city had been self-supporting in 1929. In New York City, this group was said to account for over 85 percent. “Girls who usually work in the stores, offices, and factories” were out of work and increasingly without resources according to one reliable report. Unfortunately, “coming to the attention of relief authorities” did not mean that these women had recourse to welfare; on the contrary, until FERA was funded in 1934 little relief, public or private, was available to women (or men) who were located outside of recognized family units.
No one actually knew the extent of the crisis. In testimony to a Senate committee in July 1932, William Hodson, director of the Welfare Council in New York City, stated flatly that “no satisfactory estimates are available.” That same year the director of the CRB conceded that “the Bureau’s numbers were fragmentary, not even approximately accurate.” After three winters of deepening economic crisis, private welfare agencies across the country admitted that only a small percentage of homeless women were known, although rough estimates suggest that women constituted about 10 percent of the urban homeless population.
Given the obvious problems of counting and the fact that most women in need of shelter were not registered with any agency, any figures are suspect. No two studies agree, but all stress that the numbers are conservative and based on limited information, educated guesses, and, very often, political manipulation. Nevertheless, the statistics we do have allow us to see the rapid escalation in the number of females without permanent shelter.
By comparing the number of “female beds” occupied in the women s division of the Municipal Lodging House in New York City between 1920 and 1932, the dramatic increase in the numbers of women given shelter is evident. Recording 3,039 female beds in 1920, 5,814 in 1929, 23,380 in 1931, and 56,808 in 1932, the “Muni” was inundated by demands for space. And these figures are for an institution that was signed chiefly to care for the habitually destitute and uneducated woman” and was avoided at all costs by “destitute women entering the ranks of the homeless” for the first time. The Emergency Employment Commission reported that between August 1929 and August 1930 the number of individual women given shelter in the five boroughs of New York City had risen dramatically-over 270 percent. Nels Anderson, a member of the National Committee on the Care of the Transient and Homeless, estimated that there were at least 10,000 newly homeless women in the city in 1932, and that number did not include the technically homeless , who, like Belle Jones, had lost their apartments or homes and had to move in with other people. The following year, the manager of the City Federation of Women’s Club Hotel [sic] refuted Anderson’s figures as much too low, claiming that 75,000 New York City women were without homes; these are the women, he said, “who drift from one employment office to another, who rest in Grand Central and Pennsylvania station waiting rooms, who ride the subways at night, and who eat in the penny kitchens on Sixth and Ninth Avenues.”
From time to time, a journalist would try to force people to “see” the new social reality. Surveying the situation in December 1932, a New York Times reporter moved beyond numerical abstractions and looked for “Jane Doe, Lone Woman” in a number of cities. He confirmed the paradox of her physical presence and her near invisibility. And this subjective “invisibility” was the crux of the problem. Local welfare agencies recognized something extraordinary was going on, as did the reporter, but it was easy for women to escape attention, he concluded, because ”surveys revealing the plight of unemployed men have passed her by.” The Times article estimated that in Washington, D.C., alone 10,000 women, unemployed and often homeless, were hidden “behind the ranks of hungry men.” Women in the most dire straits were slow to seek assistance, city authorities claimed, preferring to “drift along” and “suffer in silence” rather than endure the public shame of asking for charity. The War Cry, the Salvation Army’s weekly publication, had observed this situation a year earlier, noting “Many a woman who had come to the verge of starvation was prevented by pride from asking for public relief.” Those women “who had been accustomed to plenty” were “among the saddest and most difficult to help.” Meridel Le Sueur, at that time a reporter for a number of publications on the political Left, agreed with these mainstream sources. Writing for the American Mercury magazine in 1934, she described women who “starved slowly in furnished rooms. They sold their furniture, their clothes, and then their bodies.” “A woman will shut herself up in a room until it is taken away from her, and eat a cracker a day and be as quiet as a mouse, so there are no social statistics concerning her,” she was later to say. Le Sueur may have been writing within the standard proletarian rhetorical framework of the decade, but while exploring the vulnerabiities and the quick economic decline of women who had been “accustomed to making their own way,” she does confront the vexing question of why the representation of the crisis is gendered as male.
In a May 1933 article in the New Republic, journalist Emily Hahn attempted to historicize explanatory categories, to move beyond the limitations of a sex-gender system that began and ended with women’s traditional domestic identity, and to analyze the new structure of social and family relations. “She is a new factor,” Hahn explained. “In the past before she and her kind were emancipated she would have been someone’s poor relation, doing the dull jobs around the house, and in hard times entitled to whatever protection her people could give. Now she is a has-been with the memory of past success to render her less malleable, less easily placed, and more alone.” A month earlier, the YWCA publication, The Woman’s Press, had echoed Hahn’s theme almost word for word. “It is still difficult for the average person to comprehend how completely changed is the situation.. . [from] when the family roof tree was sufficiently spacious to accommodate those of the family who needed help and shelter. Today home is often a two or three room city apartment and the ‘unattached’ aunt or cousin must shift for herself.” Or, as Le Sueur says simply, “Their families are gone. They are alone now.”
Although traditional notions of gender were no longer useful, these efforts to illuminate the mismatch between mental image and reality, in fact, reinforced conventional gender norms of female passivity and victimization. Alice Kessler-Harris has written of an “unspoken social prescription—a tacit understanding about the primacy of home roles … [The] pervasive and unshakable sense of women’s place which was unmovable in the face of women’s real lives.” There was no imagined alternative to the home; it was where women belonged and gender difference was integral to its operation. Private charities and social service agencies were organized to aid families and keep them together; public policy was predicated on the family unit, and the breakup of families not only amounted to failure but also threatened social breakdown. The independent working woman, whatever her personal history or individual situation, was supposed to “return home.” Men in shelters frequently acknowledged that when they lost their home s they had sent their wives and children “back to her parents.”
Yet reliance on the family was, in its effect, a discursive frame that was problematic for many women. The imagined, nurturant world of pre-industrial domestic harmony was sadly out of date. In the first place, there is abundant evidence of severe pressure on families and of family breakdown. Second, unlike previous economic depressions, people this time around, with the exception of many African Americans, were often without rural roots. For some women, home protection had already failed. Often, a family connection was weak, there was no family to fall back upon, or a family could not maintain itself—over-burdened budgets and over-crowded households could not be stretched indefinitely. Many older women, women over thirty-five or forty, who were “always girls until they lost their jobs,” had few options; discriminated against because of age and no longer allowed to make an economic contribution, they often had no place in the family unit and, consequently, no place to call home.
This, then, was the tension: Living outside of conventional family networks, unattached women had moved from the chimney corner to center stage, but categories of female representation remained frozen. In the face of overwhelming economic crisis, the “new woman” of the 19205 easily slipped out of sight. The new construction of reality rarely included gender as a significant factor and thus had a negligible impact on public awareness of the situation of women. Both defined and delimited by the ideology of family, home, and the private sphere, women, ironically, were ignored when that sphere was threatened or lost.
“One of the strangest things about the depression,” historian Frederick Lewis Allen wrote, “is the fact that it was so nearly invisible to the casual eye.” You could often “feel it,” one woman remembered, “but you couldn’t look out of the window and see it.” In her article, “The Evidence of Experience,” Joan Scott asks us to consider how vision is structured, how the eye lets in what it has been taught to see. Or, as Martha Banta noted, “there is no such thing as an innocent eye.” We continually see and read the world in the form of generalized types, “especially the types of women equated with American principles.” Using these analyses of the constructed nature of perception, gender, and experience as a framework, the more interesting question is not whether people could or could not “see” the Great Depression, but why representation of the crisis, particularly in the cities, was (and is) so often gendered as male.
Photography has been a powerful and subjective medium in our reading of this period. In the South and Midwest, Resettlement and Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographs of desperately poor families on drought-ruined farms or on the road dominate the iconography; in the North we have images of men—men selling apples, camping out in “tin cities” and Hoovervilles, working in public parks, and standing in long lines seeking work, food, shelter, or relief. Unlike the often searing FSA photographs, no one captured the trauma of urban women; their representation is almost non-existent. I found a single image of a woman selling apples in 1930, but almost no visual evidence of women in those two symbolic spatial locations of the period—breadlines and shantytowns. The twin problems of urban poverty and homelessness are framed as male; men without jobs and a regular source of income were the key factor for gauging the level of economic distress and despair in the cities. We have created our history “from visible signs whose significance is taken for granted,” and families in the South and men in the North dominate both the cultural landscape of collective memory and most contemporary interpretations.
The virtual absence of homeless urban women from the photographic record and most printed primary sources says a great deal about the conditions under which meaning is produced. These women are not objectively invisible, but then as now their voices are largely silent, and most sources contain only fragments about their situation. For example, Nels Anderson, a respected sociologist and author of “The Homeless in New York City,” a confidential report published in 1934, declared that “all references to homeless in this report are to men”—when women are included “the fact will be specifically mentioned.” Anderson was not oblivious to the situation of women; he saw and marked the addition of a younger group of women whom he identified as “mostly white collar or lace collar workers” to the homeless community, but at the same time, by not including them in his study, he casually dismissed both the novelty and the dimensions of the problem. “The agencies in New York City that came under the purview of this investigation,” he explained, “are not the agencies that have been receiving the great number of destitute women recently entering the ranks of the homeless.” Anderson understood that three years into the depression neither the city nor local relief organizations could readily overlook the plight of homeless women, but he concentrated on homeless men, the group with which he was familiar, and ignored the broader significance of his own observations. Had Anderson extended his investigation of homelessness not only might he have challenged unexamined political assumptions but he also would have aided local welfare providers, relief agencies, and the public in understanding the true dimensions and nature of the deepening crisis.
With or without an accurate assessment of the situation, authorities in New York City and Chicago were forced by sheer numbers to acknowledge the existence of a large group of women who had lost their homes and to respond to their need for shelter. In October 1932, the Emergency Unemployment Relief Committee warned that a tragedy of major proportions was imminent in New York—demands for shelter for unattached women were estimated to be 500 percent over 1931, and, the Relief Committee predicted, the city would be called upon to house 30,000 women during the coming winter. Relief in New York, the director admitted, was on a “disaster basis.”
How did the city handle the huge numbers of women needing basic shelter? The confidential Report on the Municipal Lodging House of New York City may be instructive here. Published by the Welfare Council in April 1932, the report documented the numbers of women and men given food and shelter by New York City at selected times during the previous year. What we learn is this: the numbers of transient, homeless men were expected to swell in periods of economic crisis and had done so regularly since the depression of the 1890s; large numbers of homeless women were a new and poorly understood phenomenon, and the city was not prepared. Contrary to past experience, most of the women who sought refuge at Salvation Army facilities and at the Municipal Lodging House in the early 1930s were not the habitually destitute or “nomads” as they were often called. Instead, they were emergency cases, the short-term homeless, ordinarily self-supporting women who suddenly found themselves without financial resources and isolated in their new poverty. For these women there was a direct tie between the loss of a job and the loss of a home.
With a capacity of 155 beds and six cribs, the women’s division of the Municipal Lodging House logged over 56,000 “beds” during 1932, the third full year of the depression. And this number does not begin to reflect the need for public shelter for impoverished women in New York City. The Salvation Army recorded over 19,000 “female relief beds” at two locations during 1935-when demand had lessened to some degree. These published figures are unreliable, however, because restrictions based upon race and religion prohibited many referrals and discouraged women from seeking help. Uncounted numbers of women avoided public shelters if at all possible, sleeping in parks (which were deemed unsafe) and riding the subways at night (referred to on the street as “the old 5-cent lodging”). Not unlike the situation in the 1980s, many women patched together temporary solutions and never appeared in any census.
Beyond raw quantitative data, the report on the Municipal Lodging House concentrated on the twin issues of institutional organization and gender, particularly on the fixing of sexual boundaries. The entire second floor of the six story building was given over to women and children; they slept there and received their meals there. Deeming it “undesirable to feed women and children in public,” Lodging House administrators admitted them at a separate entrance “on the far side of the building” and sent them “directly upstairs.” The Salvation Army was equally concerned with gender respectability and shielded the newly-poor woman from the public gaze. At its emergency food stations and shelters, men stood on lines that stretched down the street, while women and children either waited indoors and out of sight for food and beds or were fed at separate locations.
Ironically, it was the very absence of women from the lengthy shelter and breadiines that obscured public understanding, reinforcing the assumption that women were not genuinely needy and that the economic catastrophe was a particularly male problem. Not publicly hungry, not conspicuous on the streets, and not a mainstay of the mainstream press, the destitute female was not looked for and only sporadically seen. Her invisibility was assured by a deadly combination of an entrenched ideology, public policy, and seemingly gender-based choices.
In the absence of representation to build upon, people saw only what was in front of them and what they thought it natural to see. Newspaper and magazine articles seem to hint at Joan Scott’s analysis; although not a fully conscious process, the very structure of perception blocked vision. People did not see these women because they did not expect to see them; they had not learned to see them, and in complicated ways they did not want to see them. In no other period of economic crisis had so many women been marginally self-supporting and living on their own, outside the “protection’ of family. Yet, the cultural expectation that women were ensconced in a stable domestic environment continued to shape perception even in the face of new realities-the loss of jobs and income and even homes.
The explanation for the inability of the public to see and understand the situation of homeless women hinges on two interrelated historical factors: the way we understand work and theories of the family-both of which are dependent upon deeply ingrained ideas of gender difference. Recent historical literature demonstrates that although the numbers of working women in the United States increased rapidly over the course of the twentieth century, the political legitimacy and dominance of the male breadwinner ideal precluded seeing women, single or married, as either independent workers or providers. Women may have constituted more than 25 percent of the total labor force in the United States in 1930, but neither labor unions, male workers, nor any branch of government recognized women as permanent members of the labor force, and many fully employed women defined themselves as “homemakers,”. outside the sphere of wage work.
No matter how they interpreted their individual work lives, by 1930 the large number of women workers reflected ongoing changes in the economy and challenged entrenched gender norms. Arguments about the propriety of women, particularly married women, taking jobs away from “family men” raged during the depression. In part a reflection of the social anxieties that usually accompany perceived or actual changes in women’s activities, but in part a complex mixture of legitimate fear for the security of the male breadwinners’ position in a collapsing economy, these arguments created a chorus of support for what historian Lois Scharf describes as a movement to “put the women back into the home.” Scharf points out that bitter rivalries between unemployed single and married women were not uncommon even though many married women workers were in fact heads of households. Some women had no man in the house, while others had disabled husbands as well as children and other family members dependent upon them. “The living depends on me,” a desperate woman wrote of a sick husband and three children in August of 1933.
“The Forgotten Man” may have been a memorable image, emblematic of the devastation of the depression, but in letters to highly placed people in Washington such as Eleanor Roosevelt; Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor; and Harry Hopkins, director of FERA, women made it clear that they were neither passsive nor victims, but they were needy. In their insistence on recognition and jobs and places to live for “The Forgotten Woman,” they made tangible demands on the state. One desperate woman from Cleveland, Ohio, had been unemployed for over two years and had “no home and no friends”; she pleaded for some direction. Another described the deplorable condition of the single women of Chicago, who “are roaming the streets wondering where they are going to get the price of a meal, and how they are going to pay their room rent … Do we a]l have to starve to death … in order to get a job?” the writer wondered. A Georgia woman asked, “What can be done for the woman to whom employment means life and necessities … women who have no men to work for them or [are the] sole support of others.” A middle-aged widow who had been unemployed for twenty-seven weeks concluded simply, women “must live as well.” Homeless or on the cusp of homelessness, the letter writers pleaded for someone to acknowledge that their needs were genuine and their losses real.
These letters, which are all from the early months of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term, reflected the despair of the moment but also the certainty that work would bring redemption to women as well as to men. “We don’t ask for charity we ask for jobs” was a continuing refrain. Many of the letters pinpointed the gap between ideology and reality—the continuing paradox and disabling effects of an inflexible gender dichotomy grounded on female subordination. Even when women had no men to work for them,” as the woman from Georgia pointed out, and were heads of their own households they were marginalized, excluded from most work programs, and rendered officially mute.
If we accept the gendered nature of social practice, institutional behavior, and relief politics, it follows that women without work and without permanent shelter were neutralized by common attitudes and expectations. Large numbers of visibly destitute “respectable” women would have disrupted the popular understanding of the normative family and the sexual division of labor. Handicapped by embedded and hegemonic constructions of the social world, of urban public space, and of wage work that pitted male independence against female domesticity, gender difference, and dependence, the situation of these women, most observers agreed, was overshadowed not only by the far greater number of men in dire straits but also by masculine claims to economic resources. Gender ideology and economic crisis went hand-in-hand. No matter the reality of women’s increasing social independence, workforce participation, and prominence in political life, the assumption that women lived or should live in families as dependents of men lingered as an unacknowledged component of public discourse and revealed the gender politics embedded in social policy. Homeless women were stigmatized and often appeared immobilized by a sex-gender system that enshrined family and the male breadwinner role and rendered them publicly invisible.
Herbert Hoover’s President’s Emergency Committee for Employment (PECE) exemplifies this issue of differential legitimacy. Part of the federal government’s feel-good campaign to restore public confidence in late 1930 and 1931, PECE saw its role in specific and limited terms: it was to “coordinate and accelerate efforts to provide employment for men out of work.” As the unemployment rate of women workers doubled and doubled again in these years and homelessness became a reality, it is significant that women were not thought to need or to deserve public support, even of a symbolic nature. Women’s economic role may have been secondary; men were the main breadwinners in the United States. Because of the intractable nature of the sexual division of labor, however, women’s work filled specific, critical niches. Yet, in a period of deep financial crisis, the creation of jobs appeared to be the solution for the male population alone. Women were to be only the indirect beneficiaries of policies that reinforced ideological assumptions about gender and demeaned women’s work outside the home. Despite the, obvious reality, workers were, by definition, male, and women were marginal to both labor’s language and iconography. Home was still seen as the arena for women, and the crisis of the Great Depression merely reinforced the patriarchal vision of traditional family structure.
Although cities and states varied widely in their response to poverty, the twin problems of joblessness and providing relief had been traditionally a local and often a private responsibility in the United States. Prior to the depression, relief was not organized to take care of everyone, and even in New York City, which was reputed to have the best welfare services in the country, public “outdoor relief’ had been limited to the Board of Child Welfare, veterans and their families, and “the blind dole.” The YWCA, the Salvation Army, and agencies affiliated with the three major religious denominations provided a variety of programs for particular groups: the elderly, widows, deserted women and children, the occasional female hobo, reformed prostitutes, and unwed mothers. Private agencies supported subsidized group housing, clubs, and boarding homes for small numbers of working girls as well.
Under the Hoover administration, the federal government maintained its traditional hands-off policy with respect to most forms of social welfare, depending upon voluntary action and local communities to deal with what optimists predicted was a short-term crisis. No municipality was prepared for the magnitude of need. Although New York City was prohibited by its charter from providing general outdoor relief, in 1930 the police department distributed emergency grocery orders, clothing, and even some rent vouchers to legal residents with dependent children. Private donations, including “voluntary” deductions of 1 percent from the monthly pay checks of teachers and municipal employees, were supposed to make up for inadequate city funds. When economic conditions deteriorated rapidly during what welfare agencies commonly referred to as “the disaster winter” of 1930-1931, and unemployment and real privation became a mass problem rather than an individual one, the New York State legislature, prodded by the city, passed the Wicks, or Temporary Emergency Relief Act (TERA), in late 1931. A model for the time, TERA was to provide both home relief and work projects to “eligible categories” of needy people. With funding inadequate, appropriations sporadic, and racism endemic, the categories were interpreted narrowly.
Single people were ineligible for home relief. Recognizing that “there would not be enough work for all of the persons in need,” TERA administrators instituted a triage system; adults without legal dependents were placed on the bottom rungs on the “order of worker preference” and in the equation of need. One social worker explained, “the door just isn’t wide enough to let in all who come to it,” or, as Meridel Le Sneur commented, “it is hard for a lone woman to get much attention from the charities.”
This lack of a safety net for specific groups was characteristic of welfare policy prior to 1934. Organized to aid needy families with dependent children, neither private relief organizations nor city agencies were prepared for the woman who seemed to exist outside of a normative family structure and had no one from whom she could claim support or protection. It seems as if two strands come together to structure our vision of these women. Not only are they not “publicly hungry,” but there are so many impoverished groups ahead of them that they are virtually not in the queue. Public policy responds to magnitude and pressure, and in a relative sense homeless women provided neither. Prior to the Great Depression the homeless woman was not a category even recognized by social work professionals—she was no one’s client. In the midst of an extended economic crisis, she was simply “a non-family woman.” According to Mary Simkhovitch, director of New York City’s Greenwich House, she was “a discard” whose individual needs seemed inconsequential in the face of other, more demanding priorities.
The responses of cities to the depression depended upon a number of variables, including available private resources. New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Detroit represented entirely different political and economic situations. But even New York City, a leader in the field of social services whose numbers of needy residents in 1933 staggered such seasoned observers as Lorena Hickok, was slow to focus on the predicament of the non-family woman. The city set up the Emergency Work Bureau (EWB) in 1930 as a temporary measure to deal with what was expected to be a short-lived unemployment crisis, meaning, at the time, men out of work. The thinking here was typical, with “no history of women in industry or in the professions being seriously affected in any previous period of unemployment,” one board member carefully explained, none of the men on the board of directors (and they were all men and all white) considered that women who lost their jobs and income might constitute a problem.
The formation of the Women’s Division of the EWB during the winter of 1931 was an afterthought that signaled both the rapid deterioration of the economy and the first inkling of a reevaluation of the situation of the “non-family” urban woman. Headed by the philanthropist, Mrs. August Belmont, the Women’s Division, known as the Emergency Employment Committee Women’s Fund, took an activist role, resisting the official marginalization of formerly “independent” women and demanding public recognition of their plight. Understanding gender relations to be relations of power and money, Eleanor Belmont provided a counter narrative to the masculinist vision of the crisis. The Women’s Fund hoped to raise $350,000—the money to be kept separate from other EWB contributions and used to aid single, primarily white-collar women living in New York City who were unemployed and often homeless, women who were “without family ties, and no one to call upon for help.” “The need is very real and requires immediate and extensive relief,” Belmont wrote in one appeal. “A room in which to live is an immediate need of some of these women.” For the first and perhaps the only time in these years the jobless/homeless American had a female face, one given to her by other women.
The Women’s Fund published a four-page fund-raising leaflet that underscored the singular gender dimensions of the Great Depression. Entitled “Single and Unattached Women and Girls,” over which was written in bright blue script “… And These Lone Women?” the text is one hard sell, laying out the immediate problem, the proposed solution- provision of jobs, shelter, and temporary loans-the amount sought, and, most important, where to send the check. The Women’s Fund raised money for a select female clientele, but it was clearly a limited, stop-gap measure which had little more than symbolic effect Not even Belmont could muster the public attention or financial resources to appreciably affect the general complacency about homeless women in the midst of the dire conditions of 1931-1932. As the Women’s Fund exposed the weakness of voluntarism in coping with a national disaster, it also reflected the old arguments over special welfare provisions for women. The conundrum persists; without specific attention to women’s experiences, public attention and public policies focus mainly on men. When stories of women are given distinct treatment, the effect is to isolate female experience and to sidetrack the creation of an overall social policy.
The EWB could place only a fraction of the 500 to 700 women who sought work every day during the first half of 1932. By June, the shortage of jobs was a moot point; funds had dried up, and there was no work for anyone. Class, race, and age played mediating roles; former “industrial workers” were sent to that old female standby, the sewing workshop, and white-collar “business girls” were directed to not-for-profit agencies and institutions. Black women, when they were considered at all, were in a Separate category, as in “200 colored women are being placed Monday and Tuesday of next week,” which implies menial jobs in segregated situations. Age was a subject of constant negotiation. The study of job openings in the Philadelphia Employment Office not only uncovered the fact that 68 percent of job orders specified white women, but these white stenographers and clerks had to be under 25 years old. Conditions in New York City could not have been very different. Comprising almost one-third of unemployed women in 1 931-1932, “older women” (women over 35) were desperate for jobs “in order to maintain themselves, and sometimes others,” but had few possibilities. A good number of them, with no money for rent, ended up homeless.
The Great Depression had a profound and devastating impact on people’s lives, yet throughout the decade public debate about the crisis was often treated as if it were a problem that men alone confronted. In this rendering the male body was indeed privileged. Not only were women’s needs marginal to discussions of joblessness and lack of shelter, but the representational silence surrounding the unattached, often homeless women was marked. Women appear in fragments. With the exception of a Belmont and her Women’s Fund, the flood of reports from the Women’s Bureau, the occasional newspaper feature article on “Forgotten Women,” and the radical press and the Unemployed Councils, these women had few allies and little public or institutional support. If seeing is the origin of knowing, women as a group were occasionally watched but not always seen in the early years of the depression. Traditionally the providers, the breadwinners, and heads of nuclear families, men were the focus.
The failure to see the homeless woman, however, rests on a more complex dynamic: expectations were inseparable from available ideologies and a sense of the social order-the certainty of how women and men should live and act, how they should be, and where they should be. This ideal social order included clear lines of racial and gender difference and enshrined the family as the quintessential social institution. Because it reinscribed more traditional social relations, in a period of crisis it was resistant to change and precluded serious consideration of the “non-family” woman. What we have is a perpetuation not only of myth but also of an outdated social construct. The homeless woman was caught in a sex-gender system that manipulated both the ability and the willingness to see-to comprehend and to respond to the diverse realities of the category “woman.” Women outside of families, women alone, without work, and often without shelter, were so marginal that they were indeed nearly invisible.
The implications of this invisibility for public policy and for feminist analysis are contradictory. In the economic devastation of the 1930s, the focus of policy was helping men get back to work. Singling out homeless women was a sympathetic but fleeting and ineffective response that ignored those who were neither white nor white collar. Today, homeless women are highly visible and often stigmatized. Women’s poverty is a complex state, and although a myriad of government programs attempt to keep people housed, there are more women homeless in New York City today than there were five years ago. What feminist analysis needs to consider is just how the deconstruction of gender can work to enable policy makers to make decisions that will broaden the definition of work and create an environment in which humane political choices contribute to women’s economic and social well-being.