Homeless Mothers: Face to Face with Women and Poverty

by Deborah R. Connolly

Overview

Does the woman with no money, no home, and no help have any chance at all of being a good mother? This woman's voice, so rarely heard and so often ignored, resonates throughout this book, which describes the lives of mothers on the margins and asks where they fit in the model set up by our society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816632824
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	12/12/2001
Edition description:	First edition
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	5.75(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d)

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	vii
	List of Key Figures	xi
	Introduction	xv
1.	Kristy: A Narrative	1
2.	Motherly Things	39
3.	Precarious Lives	72
4.	"Patches on the Wound": Politics and Dynamics at Westside Community Center	111
5.	"Don't Feed the Alligators": Debating Welfare	150
6.	Leaving the Field	178
	Notes	197
	Bibliography	203
	Index	211

What People are Saying About This

Valerie Hartouni

Homeless Mothers follows the daily lives and struggles of a small group of women as they negotiate violence, addiction, poverty, fractured familial ties, and and an overrun social service system, constrained in terms not only of funds and staff, but also the explanatory models it brings to bear in assessing and assisting its primarily female clients and their children. From the finely crafted account Connolly offers of her work as a social service provider in a small non-profit community center, a rich and complicated set of portraits emerge of the suffering and survival of women situated on the material and ideological margins of social life. These portraits challenge the crude political depictions of such women that accompanied the call for welfare reform during the 1990s and provide a compelling foundation for reevaluating the ways in which homeless is culturally understood and addressed.
— (Valerie Hartouni, author of Cultural Conceptions)