Women on The Street

Women on the Street

Have you ever rushed down the street and felt that nagging feeling of guilt, as you breeze by someone lying in a doorway? Is she alive? Is she ill?

Why do we all rush by without finding out is she's all right?

People sit in train stations, bus stations, parks, doorways, unmistakably sick, with what, we don't know. All are seemingly alone. Some beg.

Some don't. Some have open sores that ooze and bleed. Some are drunk. Some talk to themselves or formless others. They have no homes.

Street people make up a small percentage of the homeless population.

Most homeless people blend into the daily flow of urban life. Many families are homeless. Many babies go from the hospital into the shelter system, never knowing what it is like to go home. Women are another subgroup of the homeless.

Solutions to homelessness are not easily found. But before we can solve problems, we must be sensitive enough that we create the will to find the solutions. Often if we do not feel the problem, if some emotional response is not made, we are not moved to seek solutions. We are often unmoved to even recognize the questions. We cannot afford to keep walking by.

"Work is a fundamental condition of human existence," said Karl Marx. In punch-the-clock and briefcase societies no less than in agricultural or hunting and gathering societies, it is the organization of work that makes life in communities possible. Individual life as well as social life is closely tied to work. In wage labored societies, and perhaps in every other as well, much of an individual's identity is tied to their job. For most people jobs are a principal source of both independence and correctness to others. It should come as no surprise that, in the work force or out, work and jobs are important in the lives of homeless women.

There are women who want to work and do, and women who want to work and do not. There are women who cannot work and others who should not work and still others who do not want to work. Some work regularly, some intermittently; some work part-time, some full-time; and there are even those who work two jobs.

At any given moment, there is a lot of job-searching, job losing, job changing, and ...

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...es could have contained the explosive forces of racial animosity, social class differences, competition for resources, overcrowding, individuals who were not always in control of their actions, and individuals who wanted to disassociate themselves from the group. but came against these forces, and born mainly out of shared homelessness and common needs, was a powerful impulse to group cohesion and solidarity. Most of the time, the impulse to solidarity was strong enough to hold the negative forces in check, there by providing the minimum of peace and good order that made social life possible. On many evenings, as the women came together in the shelter, there was sufficient good feeling and fellow feelings, when coupled with their common needs and circumstances, to allow a sense of community to sputter into life. For most women, the loneliness of their homeless state was a terrible burden to bear; this fragile bit of community, however small, was precious indeed.

"Homelessness is the sum total of our dreams, policies, intentions, errors, omissions, cruelties, kindness, all of it recorded, in the flesh, in the life of the streets." (Marin 41).