Inequality, violence, and gender relations in a global city: New York, 1986–1996

In the 1980s and 1990s, the transformation of the United States toward a global and information‐oriented economy has precipitated changing expectations and opportunities for working class men and women. Men have lost work, poor women have lost welfare benefits and many working class people no longer have access to adequate housing. The overall impact of these changes, including the uneven destruction of poor communities and the shifting, unstable gender hierarchies they have produced, has been to generate intense conflict reflected in increased violence in the community and in the household. The research described below, based on fieldwork in New York City in the 1990s among women and their families who have been relocated from family shelters into permanent housing, begins to outline some of the intervening processes that foster violence towards poor women. For many women violence is the immediate event that precipitates them into homelessness. But, when women leave the shelter system and have to create their lives anew, they are often alone and in need of help. Their isolation puts them, once again, at risk of finding men who help in some ways but also abuse them. The analysis examines the areas, such as child care, that social services are able to address and other areas in which such services fail. Overall, the paper suggests that the global city which New York has become in the 1990s has generated an increase in inequality, which in turn increases violence in shifting poor communities and relocated households.

Key words:

• Violence
• Poverty
• Urban
• United States
• Gender