Introduction

Definitions of homelessness and the housing policies which are founded on particular definitions construct some individuals as in need of housing while marginalising others. These definitions are gendered and have served to marginalise women's homelessness at the same time as operating with normative assumptions around the patriarchal family and women's place within it. Over time these normative assumptions have shifted and so too has the social and political/economic context in which they are embedded. The first part of this chapter will look briefly at the history of women's homelessness, and the reactions it produced. In the course of the discussion these interrelationships will become clear.

The rest of this chapter is divided into three sections. Part of my argument is that women's experiences of homelessness, like other homeless groups, cannot be separated from the vexed question of the meanings and definitions of homelessness. The gender connotations of homelessness are considered through analysing homeless women's experience as well as the official definitions and categories. These understandings of homelessness have to be situated also in the social, economic and political conditions which precipitate some households into homelessness, and these too change over time. The second section thus considers some specific causes of women's homelessness as well as the broader social, economic and housing context. In the last part of the chapter I draw on recent post-structuralist and feminist thought to engage in a more speculative discussion of the importance of challenging homelessness at the level of the social imaginary and discursive practices. For homelessness as a gendered experience to be addressed, fundamental shifts in social relations as lived, represented and imagined will need to take place.

Women and homelessness: exploring the past

In the 19th century, despite the traditional image of the male vagabond and wanderer, many women were to be found in the casual wards, lodging houses, or working in domestic service due to a lack of alternative forms of independent income. Victorian morality and family values were deeply threatened by the presence of women in what were seen as dens of iniquity. In 1851 Mayhew railed:

… the indiscriminate admixture of the sexes among adults, in many of these places, is another evil. Even in some houses considered of the better sort, men and women, husbands and wives, old and young, strangers and acquaintances, sleep in the same apartment and if they choose, the same bed. (Quennell, 1949, p x)