No room of her own

"This oral history collection brings together extended interviews with fifteen women who share the common experience of homelessness. While all the interviews were conducted in Seattle, Washington between 1991 and 2008, the women's stories zigzag across the country, from Baltimore and New York City, to Louisiana and Kentucky, to Los Angeles and San Francisco. The narrators recount stories of growing up in the south at the tail end of Jim Crow, of growing up gay and Black in the Pacific Northwest in the 1960s, and of surviving childhood molestation in Harlan, Kentucky in the 1970s. The stories illuminate the part that gender roles play in ensnaring women in cycles of domestic abuse and homelessness. They speak to the physical stresses of homelessness, and the toll it takes on bodies already weakened by high blood pressure, strokes, sickle cell anemia, and epilepsy and the routine threats of physical violence that homeless women in particular encounter on the street. At the same time, however, the stories challenge liberal myths about homeless people, and homeless women in particular, as vulnerable and dependent people worthy perhaps of sympathy but judged to be socially disorganized, disaffiliated, and disempowered"--