Homeless Families

Jonathan Kozol describes "Homeless in America" as ". . . a valuable collection of enlightened writings by those who know the challenges and realities first-hand". An authoritative work on a compelling subject, this comprehensive title offers investigative essays on key policy-related issues surrounding homelessness. It also answers hundreds of questions about the magnitude and implications of this complex social issue. Illus.

This collection of essays addresses the lack of shelter--one of the most basic elements of human adaptation--now experienced by many Americans. Based on the presupposition that shelter is a basic human right in the world's richest, most advanced nation, the authors of these essays look more closely than others have yet done at the causes of the current low-income housing crisis and homelessness. Ten anthropologists and a mental health worker use participant observation and other ethnographic methods to observe and document the experiential and geographic diversity of U.S. homelessness. Each chapter focuses on a specific geographic area--urban, suburban, or rural--and a specific category of homeless people--families with children, solitary adults, or both. Based on their findings, the authors also present policy recommendations to ameliorate the housing shortage and prevent homelessness at local, state, and federal levels.

Anthropologists turn their attention to solving the puzzle of why people in some of the most advanced technological societies in the world are homeless, living rough.

Would a good mother sleep with her children in a car parked on a city street in the dead of winter? Would a good mother send her child to school in shoes two sizes too big because that's all she could find? Would a good mother tell her child to shut up and behave or the whole family will be out on the street again? Does the woman with no money, no home, and no help have any chance at all of being a good mother, according to the model our society sets up? This is the woman whose voice, so rarely heard and so often ignored, resonates through this book, which follows the lives of mothers on the margins and asks where they fit in our increasingly black-and-white picture of the world.

At once an anthropologist in the field and a social worker on the job, Deborah R. Connolly is ideally placed to draw out these women's life stories, the stories that our culture tells about them, and the revealing contradictions between the two. In their own words, by turns awkward and eloquent, poignant and harsh, these homeless,mothers map the perilous territory between the promise of childhood and the hard reality of motherhood on the street, between "We're never gonna get married, we're never gonna have kids" and "God, how did we end up like this?"

What emerges from these stories is a glimpse of the cultural imagination of class and gender as it revolves around the lives of mostly white homeless mothers. Attending to both everyday lives and cultural norms, while exploring and interpreting their interdependencies and tensions, Connolly makes these mothers and their plight as real for us as the headlines and stereotypes and the cultural paranoia that so often displace them and consign them to silence.

When parents must rely on public assistance and family shelters to provide for their children's most basic needs, they lose autonomy. Within a system of public assistance that already stigmatizes and isolates its beneficiaries, their family lives become subject to public scrutiny and criticism. They are parenting in public. This book is an in-depth examination of the realities of life for parents and their children in family shelters. The author uses the Massachusetts family shelter system to explore the impact of asset and deficit-oriented help-giving approaches as they are experienced by mothers and service providers. The format of the book is unique. Following each chapter are the "reflections" of a mother who has parented in a shelter, a front-line worker, and a shelter director. The author and contributors propose a "Power With" policy and practice framework that runs counter to the prevailing "Power Over" cultural policy trends. Contributors include Rosa Clark, Brenda Farrell, Deborah Gray, Michele Kahan, Margaret A. Leonard, Mary T. Lewis, Nancy Schwoyer, and Elizabeth Ward.