Homelessness as a Feminist Issue: Revisiting the 1970s

ABSTRACT

Homelessness among women is a pressing social problem and the barriers to solving it are difficult to shift. A number of scholars have argued that, in addition to the gender pay gap, unpaid labour and family violence, the problem lies in the fact that responses to homelessness are still shaped by conceptualisations that developed when it was seen as a problem of white adult men. And yet there has been no close analysis of how and why these conceptualisations took root, and how they were reinforced and perpetuated. Focusing on the pivotal 1970s, when homeless women were first constituted a ‘problem’ in Australia and feminism became a compelling political force, this article examines how feminists both challenged and reinforced those conceptualisations. It argues that feminist responses were shaped by different forms of professional knowledge which led to divergent outcomes, and it uses a rare cache of interviews to show how homeless women’s narratives refute the assumptions on which old ideas were built.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminism
• homeless women
• vagrant
• refuges
• violence
• social work
• interviews

Introduction

Every now and again women’s homelessness is rediscovered. We are arguably witnessing one such moment now, judging by the increased media coverage of the issue, and there have been similar moments in the past: in the 1930s depression homeless women ‘tramped the road’, and in the early 1910s women in rooms identified as ‘homeless’ (O’Brien 2018). But perhaps the most significant discovery was that of the 1970s when, for the first time, professionals recognised homeless women as ‘a problem’ in need of research. In broad terms, this can be seen as a product of two major shifts – the explosion of feminist consciousness particularly, but not only, among young women; and the Whitlam government’s establishment in 1974 of the Homeless Person’s Assistance Program (HPAP), the first intervention into homelessness by an Australian government, and one that effectively marks the foundation of the contemporary homelessness ‘sector’.

These two shifts stemmed from different political positions. The HPAP was something of an anomaly within the Whitlam government’s ambitious attempts to address structural inequality because it mainly funded city missions and charities – most of which were for men – to provide shelter along lines they had followed since the nineteenth century. To most feminists, charities made insufficient provision for homeless women and most were judgemental to the point of harm. Some feminists went further, challenging the male-centred understanding of homelessness used by the HPAP, arguing that it took no account of the fact that homeless women’s vulnerability to violence and shame meant they practised strategies of concealment not required of men. But there was no unified feminist position: some influential voices replicated and reinforced older individualistic understandings of the causes of homelessness while arguing a feminist interpretation of its effects. The highest profile and most radical feminist contribution to understandings of women’s homelessness came from the feminist refuge movement, which drew domestic violence to public attention and saw its victims as ‘the invisible homeless’ (Johnson 1981, 17). But refuge workers saw the needs of women leaving violence as distinct from those they described as ‘chronically homeless’, though some tried to reform the HPAP. It was complex political terrain. Over the next decades, the stakes in these debates were raised as the homelessness sector came to pick up the pieces of other shifts: accelerating deinstitutionalisation, the continuing decline in public housing and the growing dominance of free market ideology.

This article explores the congruities and tensions between diverse feminist understandings of ‘chronically homeless’ women as homelessness became a ‘sector’ in order to shed light on the gendering of homelessness policy. A number of scholars have noted that responses to homelessness are still shaped by conceptualisations that developed when was it was seen as a problem of white adult men but there has been no close analysis of how this occurred (Bretherton 2017). Focussing on feminist contributions to this moment is telling because they not only challenged existing understandings, but in some ways reinforced them as the system developed. In exploring these complexities, I draw on the extensive scholarship on 1970s feminism, including the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) and Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL), the influence of feminists in the bureaucracy, feminist theory, housing activism and particularly activism against domestic violence (e.g. Curthoys 1992; Lake 1999; Arrow 2019; McFerran 1990; Kevin 2020; Watson 1988; Ramsay 2007; Simic 2020). Here Jacqui Theobald’s research on the refuge movement’s engagement with homeless women at the policy and practical level is particularly relevant (2011, 2015). But none of this work focuses specifically on feminist ideas about ‘chronically homeless’ women. Analysis of these ideas, and the practices they supported, takes us closer towards explaining how and why the barriers to addressing homelessness among women are so difficult to overcome.

Central to the analysis are two unpublished reports: one was written by Leslie Fraser in 1977, a counsellor at Elsie, Australia’s first feminist Women’s Refuge in Sydney’s Glebe and commissioned by government – very likely by the Department of Social Security (DSS) (Fraser 1977).¹ The other was conducted by recent graduates of the Social Studies Department of the University of Melbourne in 1977 and edited by Carolyn Novarra, a lecture in that department (Novarra et al. 1977). Why these reports? As two of the first and most substantial research papers on homeless women, they enable analysis of how and why this new group came to be identified as 'a problem' in this period, denaturalising what might otherwise seem self-evident (Scott 2007). Since one was a government commission and the other was the product of a university, they were well placed to exemplify and amplify understandings of homeless women.

Neither report has been subject of historical analysis and yet, read together, they act as an entrée into the different ways that feminism and professional knowledge intersected to produce different understandings of homeless women. The Melbourne report is particularly rich because it contains transcripts of interviews with 18 women. Such a full primary source for this period, and with women as subjects, is rare. Providing first hand accounts of the material and subjective experience of women experiencing homelessness, they refute the assumptions of deficit and deservedness that beset the discourse in their own time, and continue to beleaguer it in ours.

Contexts

Why did homelessness become a subject of policy in the 1970s and how was it understood? The broad context was the 1960s rediscovery of poverty. Homeless men featured in journalist John Stubbs’ book The Hidden People, which has been credited with drawing to public attention the ‘weird blend of generosity and cruelty’ that marked the Menzies’ government’s social security system, and contributing to the establishment of an inquiry into poverty chaired by economist Ronald Henderson in 1972 (Stubbs 1966, 136). The need for more and better accommodation for homeless men was also related to the movement to decriminalise vagrancy, which accelerated in the late 1960s and 1970s, a period jurist Michael Kirby has described as a ‘golden age’ of law reform: for all its austerity, charity was assumed to be better than jail (O’Brien 2021, 4).

But homelessness was not just a problem waiting to be discovered and dealt with in the 1970s. It was sustained and expanded by government policies that, over time, led to the HPAP becoming a catch-all for other problems. One of these was deinstitutionalisation, a post-war reform whose originally idealist aims were stymied by the insufficient funding of alternatives (MacKinnon and Coleborne 2003). Shifts in the allocation of public housing also had unintended outcomes. In response to research conducted by Michael Jones of the ANU’s Urban Research Unit showing that public housing was not accessible to people who needed it most, the Whitlam government devised a new Commonwealth State Housing Agreement that targeted those most in need rather than perpetuating the privatisation that Menzies had promoted. The downside of this shift was that ‘public housing’ became ‘welfare housing’ – with all the stigmatisation that entailed – and, over the next decades, as government funding for housing declined, there was never enough for all who needed it (Hayward 1996).

Feminists made a distinctive contribution to the rediscovery of poverty. The issues taken up by the two major feminist organisations of this period – the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) and the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL) – were grounded in women’s vulnerability to poverty: abortion rights, equal pay, divorce law reform, child care and domestic violence (Lake 1999). WEL played a decisive role in the election of the Whitlam government in 1972 and this government went a considerable way towards improving women’s economic welfare by raising pensions and unemployment benefits, introducing supporting mothers’ benefits and legislating for equal pay (Mendes 2019).

But the HPAP showed few signs of feminist input. There was little research on homeless women to draw on when it was introduced. The Report of the Working Party on Homeless Men and Women (1973), which outlined the rationale of the HPAP, was informed by the post-war research commissioned by organisations that provided facilities for men and used their residents as subjects. This research was strongly influenced by North American under socialisation theory and, while not personally unsympathetic to the men who were its subjects, ended up pathologising them as social isolates – unable to sustain relationships, ‘extremely dependent’ and with very low tolerance for stress (O’Brien 2021). The definition used in the Report (1973) replicated their ‘otherness’, describing them as ‘extremely isolated from conventional society’ and participating in ‘a culture or community of their own’ (6).

Women were nevertheless on the periphery of researchers’ vision in the early 1970s, as the full title of the Report (1973) suggests. They were among the ‘city drunks’ that the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research found sentenced to goal, and they briefly featured in sociologist John de Hoog’s participant observer account of Pitt Street’s wine bars (NSW Bureau 1972; De Hoog 1972). Traditional charities were certainly aware of homeless women and of the range of circumstances that put them at risk. They had long provided shelter for sex workers, unmarried mothers, immigrants, the aged and the young. In the interwar years hostels for working women expanded considerably to cater for that simultaneously threatening and vulnerable urban phenomenon – ‘the modern girl’. Hostels offered shelter across the class spectrum, including to ‘transients’, and sought to prevent all women from travelling down the path to vagrancy. But such charities were fewer than institutional supports for men. Women without homes were more likely to be dispersed – staying with family or friends, or lodging in rooms; as one advocate observed in the 1930s, they ‘hide their want’ (O’Brien 2018). Male itineracy was rendered ordinary by the demands of the rural labour market, and the infrastructure of temporary accommodation that developed in the late 19th cities made it visible. And, however, removed from real life, ‘the swaggie’ has been a figure central to Australian cultural nationalism (Mayne 1981; Ward 1958). There was no such concentration of facilities for women and no comparable literary figure.

Feminists became conscious of the vulnerabilities of homeless women from the early 1970s. The influence of WEL can be seen in the shift in orientation of the homelessness committee of the NSW Council of Social Service (NCOSS): it was set up in 1969 in response to medical, police and business concerns about ‘Skid Row’ but by 1975 a new committee, including prominent WEL member Bridget Gilling, was promoting ties with women’s health advocates and the organisers of International Women’s Day (O’Brien 2021; NCOSS 1975). Members of the WLM were also concerned about homelessness in women. In her account of the origins of Elsie women’s refuge, Anne Summers, one of its founders, describes two chance encounters that were pivotal in her growing awareness of shelter as a political issue: one with a frail, elderly woman living in a tiny room that was ‘no better than a rats’ nest’, the other with a young woman who banged on Summers’ door one night to escape her violent boyfriend. To Summers, these incidents were connected: homelessness for women could result from immediate danger and long-term inequality (Summers 1999, 317). Several months before Elsie was founded, Sydney’s WLM held a meeting to establish a night shelter for homeless women (Ramsay 2007). After the 1974 Women’s Commission on ‘Women in a Violent Society’ drew together women whose testimony revealed ‘the dark underside of patriarchy’s attitudes to women in marriage’, the focus on women leaving violence became more sharply defined (Johnson 1981, 1). As we will see, feminist refuges were constrained in the shelter they could provide to ‘chronically homeless’ women, but some refuge workers, notably Leslie Fraser, were strong advocates for them.

Researching and Representing Homeless Women

Two of the first and most substantial reports on homeless women were produced in 1977, after the Fraser government had cut a number of the Whitlam government’s programmes and when it was clear to many feminist refuge workers that ‘chronically homeless women’ needed specific help. While the provenance of the Sydney report is not totally clear, the fact that it was distributed by the DSS reflects WEL’s influence in the bureaucracy; the fact that it was conducted by Leslie Fraser, a member of the first Elsie collective, reflects the impact of the WLM (Greenleaf 2017). The Melbourne study, conducted by four social work graduates and edited by academic Carolyn Novarra, speaks of feminism’s greater presence in social work education in the 1970s than is generally recognised. Most accounts of ‘radical social work’ argue that feminism was a ‘belated’ addition in the 1980s; indeed feminists in the refuge movement were critical of professional social work and the bureaucratic and institutional approaches it perpetuated (Healy 1993; Bullen 2010a). The authors of this report were insider critics: they concluded that the social work profession and welfare policy had ‘failed dismally’ in relation to homeless women (Novarra et al. 1977, 126).

The reports differed in their conceptualisation of homelessness, in their methods and in how they represented homeless women. At eight typed pages, the Sydney report was short, and Fraser considered it a ‘tool for discussion’ rather than ‘an adequate work of research’. She was conscious of starting from scratch – ‘not one person had an overall perspective’ on the problem when she began.

One of the significant features of this report is Fraser’s acceptance of the main premises of the earlier studies – that homelessness meant rough sleeping and was the result of under socialisation. She focussed on women who used night shelters, hospitals and clinics, most of whom she found to be drug or alcohol dependent or suffering from psychiatric illness. She concluded that homeless women could be ‘any age and colour’ and were ‘generally of working-class background’ – though some ‘started out as middle class’ – but what they had in common was an inability to integrate because they lacked the personal ‘resources’ to do so (Fraser 1977, 2).

The Melbourne authors were concerned that the focus on rough sleepers left unaddressed the pressures on women that pushed them to practice strategies of concealment; they took women in rooms as their subjects. In class, age, cultural and family backgrounds these women conform to Fraser’s findings: most were from working class families; they ranged in age from 15 to 73; three identified as Indigenous and one as a migrant. The decision to make interviews the basis of this report provided more information about the women’s backgrounds. Most were working or had worked in low-paid jobs – in shops, hospitals, factories, canneries, mills, hotels, dry-cleaner, crèches and milk-bars. Some were on pensions. Almost all were in relationships, or had been in the past, or envisaged a future relationship. Almost all were familiar with violence. They were children of violent families, partners of violent men and some had experienced violence in state institutions. Most knew ‘great unhappiness’ as children, if not due to violence, then to the death, desertion, poor health or addiction of parents without ‘private solutions’ in the form of extended family to assist them (Wells 2011, 2). Not all had unhappy childhoods. Some were non-committal and three recalled their early years with pleasure.

One of the most significant things about these reports is the extent to which they diverge in their culminating representations of their subjects. The narrative high-point of Fraser’s report was her statement that their ‘vulnerability in the world’ had made homeless women ‘deeply brutalised and injured’ – ‘more suspicious, angry, defiant, self-denigrating and guilt ridden than skid row men’ (7). The Melbourne authors took a different view. They thought that most of the women they spoke to were making a go of extremely difficult circumstances and that some had ‘great strengths’, though they noted that some of the young women were very depressed (125). How can we explain this difference? It may reflect that, as each report accessed women via different facilities, the women themselves were different. But women using shelters and women renting rooms were never discrete categories: a number of the Melbourne women had experienced shelters and some had slept out; some had moved twice in the last 6 months; about half had been heavy drinkers – four still drank heavily. It is also likely that the women in Fraser’s report used rooms, though she did not access them there. The prior relationship between interviewer and interviewee may also have played in. Fraser’s views may have been influenced by direct experience of the anger of women turned away from Elsie, which ceased accommodating them while the report was being conducted. The Melbourne authors, on the other hand, had known some of the interviewees through their work as volunteers and the intimate detail shared suggests mutual trust.

The training and backgrounds of the authors were also likely to have influenced the texts. As a community nurse who had run a clinic for alcoholics, Fraser saw the women through a medical lens (SMH 19 August 1975). Her main categories were medical and under socialisation’s starting point was deficiency. Critics were starting to challenge the labelling of people without homes by the mid-1970s – the Melbourne authors among them (O’Brien 2021). Fraser’s text reflects its continuing credibility.

While Fraser deployed this individualising theory as her main explanation for homelessness in women, her analysis of its consequences was gendered and structural. She was deeply concerned about homeless women’s vulnerability to sexual assault: every woman interviewed ‘had sold their bodies for alcohol, shelter and protection’; all had been raped at least once; all women suffered under the phrase ‘there is nothing worse than a homeless woman’ but it was ‘thrown at homeless women constantly’ (8). In a context where open acknowledgement of violence against women was relatively new in public discourse, this was an important statement that distinguished the experience of homeless women from that of most homeless men. It also reflected the totalising understanding of patriarchy that dominated feminism at this time. This was before the cultural turn and before research on the ‘agency’ of oppressed peoples drew Foucauldian understandings of the complex operation of power into the mainstream. It was not unusual for feminists to see working class women primarily, if not only, as victims – Miriam Dixson’s description of Australian women as ‘the doormats of the Western world’ is a memorable example (Kevin 2020; Dixon 1976). But while Fraser attributed the consequences of women’s homelessness to patriarchy, her representation of them as irreparably damaged opened the way for the sort of disparagement long directed towards the ‘woman vagrant’. The women Fraser met may well have been ‘more suspicious, angry and defiant’ than the men – they had reason to be – but her linking of these qualities with ‘brutalisation’ speaks to the entrenchment of gender ideology, which rendered such qualities in women aberrant and offensive. As we will see, Fraser came close to representing homeless women in ways perpetuated by traditional charities, and which she deplored.

The Melbourne report reflected a different blending of feminism and professional knowledge. The authors explained that the impetus for a project on women’s hidden homelessness came from the writings of ‘Mitchell, Firestone and Greer’ who argued that women’s ‘unquestioned role’ as ‘homemaker’ made the homeless woman ‘unknown and unaccepted’ (Novarra et al. 1977, 5). Their main concern was rendering faithfully the individual’s experience so there was little discussion of context. They argued that focussing on statistics to identify ‘shared characteristics’ could obscure the uniqueness of individual experience – thus the inclusion of extensive transcripts. They favoured a non-hierarchical approach, taking up British author David Brandon’s call to abandon labels such as ‘alcoholic’ which provided ‘an emotional armour’ that maintained the difference between ‘them and us’ (Novarra et al. 1977, 2). In their desire to invert power relations and validate experience they owed a debt to the ‘expressive revolution’ of the late 1960s (Hilliard 1997).

The focus on the individual in this report was in keeping with social work’s origins in case work and, coupled with the lack of context, could leave the impression that the authors saw homelessness as a product of ‘the problem family’ (Peel 2011). But individual testimony made the personal political in this decade, as the feminist practice of consciousness raising attests (Arrow 2019). In any case, the authors eschewed explanations based on individual deficit, arguing that under socialisation theory was a form of ‘injustice’ because it located the cause of homelessness ‘within the individual’ without acknowledging poverty’s structural causes (3, 124). Further, the cumulative effect of the individual stories laid bare how economic inequality and gendered fear shaped the lives of homeless women: they were constantly at risk, for any reduction in resources could precipitate ‘a major crisis’ and leave them ‘out on the streets’ (123). Unlike most contemporary studies this report refuted the assumption that people without homes were a separate ‘class or category’ and it treated them as subjects of housing: one of the questions asked about their preferred accommodation (22).

Emergency Accommodation and its Discontents

The direct impact of Fraser’s report is not clear but it presumably had some influence in the corridors of power. The urgency of her tone, her forthright, disturbing discussion of the vulnerability of homeless women, and her use of under socialisation theory made the case for action in terms that were recognisable. Former refuge worker, Ludo McFerran recalled the DSS ‘exhibiting hostility’ to feminist refuges but here Fraser was making a case for the department’s main clientele and her recommendations were largely in keeping with what the HPAP was already doing – providing temporary accommodation (McFerran 1990, 192). She wanted more, and better, for ‘chronically homeless women’.

Fraser argued that the need for emergency accommodation was urgent. The working estimate of homeless women in Sydney was 500, but there were only 50 beds in shelters so it was ‘absurd’ to think their needs were being met (2). All the medical professionals Fraser interviewed found it hard or impossible to place women following treatment, whereas they did not have the same problem placing men. Though she did not mention deinstitutionalisation, its on-going processes doubtless exacerbated long-standing insufficiency. But she thought the existing services were not just insufficient, they were not coping. The problems of women at the St Vincent de Paul’s Butler Lodge were so complex that workers needed to call on the Health Commission for help; nor could workers at the Salvation Army’s Samaritan House cater for ‘a hard core of women’ who were ‘violent and anti-social’ (4). Further, she thought that the ethos of the charities was harmful because it exacerbated the guilt these women felt as ‘failed mothers’; they felt like ‘damned whores fronting God’s police’ (4, 7). The Melbourne report confirms that this dichotomy, and the power imbalance it authorised, was deeply resented. The women described being patronised and checked up on by a network of providers in close contact; most hostels were stifling – ‘too many rules’ (p?). Dianne’s testimony was searing. Aged 15, she was ‘chucked out of the Salvation Army’ because she did not have enough money and ‘a couple of Christian Associations just didn’t want to know [her]’: ‘I just held so much against these people’. Vivid in her memory was a night sharing smack: ‘each time I hit up I thought ‘that’s for the Salvation Army’, ‘that’s for the Christian Association’ (Novarra et al., 57).

The whore/god’s police dichotomy has a virulent history in the discourse of women’s homelessness. When Gordon Moyes, Superintendent of the Central Methodist Mission (CMM), described homeless women as ‘extremely difficult to rehabilitate’ because they ‘have usually been failures as mothers, as wives and even as prostitutes’, he was reflecting the deep-rooted fear and disdain directed towards ‘the woman vagrant’ (SMH 9 August 1980). Such views were not confined to churchmen. Sociologist John de Hoog described the few women in his study of ‘Skid Row’ as ‘warn-out harlots … the most obscene and noisiest’ (De Hoog 1972, 57). Nor were religious organisations all the same. The Wayside Chapel was cited approvingly by Fraser, and community houses based on ideals of egalitarianism and collectivity were opened at this time: some of the Melbourne interviewees spoke well of these (Fitzroy History Society 2017). But the large grants in this period went to established church organisations, and for them maintaining a moral hierarchy among women had long been the rationale for providing accommodation (O’Brien 2018).

1970s feminism sought to eradicate this dichotomy. Jacqui Theobald’s interviews with workers in Melbourne’s refuge movement show that the majority objected to the judgementalism associated with traditional charity (Theobald 2015). Fraser’s report suggests their approach struck a chord. In her view, homeless women so preferred Elsie over existing shelters that when it opened ‘a vast number’ of homeless women came forward who were ‘wary’ of agencies that judged them ‘more moralistically than men’ (4, 7). But while feminist refuges were initially open to all, providing on-going accommodation for ‘chronically homeless’ women proved difficult. A number of workers in Melbourne told Theobald they regretted having to alter their rules – some recalled needing to prioritise women in ‘immediate and real physical harm’ due to domestic violence; others put it down to lack of resources (Theobald 2011, 105). In Adelaide, workers found that women with ‘fairly incapacitating problems’ needed ‘more care than we could offer’ (Otto and Haley 1975, 120). At Elsie the collective accepted ‘chronically homeless’ women for the first 18 months then reluctantly changed the rules: it was ‘the only realistic decision to make, as goodwill and kind intentions were not enough’ (Fraser 1977, 4).

Feminist refuge workers were in an almost impossible situation, struggling for resources to combat and deal with the consequences of domestic violence and pushed to make invidious decisions in the process. They nevertheless played a part in improving the visibility of homeless women. The Elsie collective collaborated with the Inner Sydney Regional Council for Social Development on a seminar on alcoholism and drug dependence in women and supported the opening of a Half-way House for women in Woolloomooloo (SMH 19 August 1975). A radio programme based on Fraser’s report was broadcast on a special session of the ABC’s feminist show ‘Coming Out Ready or Not’ in 1976 (ABC Radio 1976). But they improved the visibility of those already likely to be seen. Further, the urgency of providing shelter to women leaving violence reinforced emergency accommodation as the primary form of shelter for all homeless women.

Rooming and the Problem of Visibility

Women in rooms were hardly seen in this period. The authors of the Melbourne report sought to change this but, unlike Fraser, they were not writing for the government. Indeed, they thought ‘little’ would come of their study but saw value in ‘our own increased awareness and hopefully that of our readers’. (Acknowledgements, np). In one sense they were right: it was not until the early 1990s that people in boarding houses were included in a new ‘cultural definition’ of homelessness (Chamberlain and MacKenzie 2014). But women in rooms were not entirely invisible. The Report of the Working Party recognised that some of the 81,257 boarding house residents at the 1971 Census might be homeless, though it did not consider that many may have been women (Report 1973). In fact, a strand of North American sociological research on women in rooms stretched back to the 1940s (Hanover 1976); and in 1969 a study by the Sydney charity, the Smith Family, found that ‘thousands’ of ‘solitary women’ were living in acute poverty in rented rooms within a couple of miles of the centre of Sydney – but it did not consider them ‘homeless’ (AIPS 1969, 31). The Melbourne report linked the problem of the room with the problem of women’s homelessness.

Boarding houses were not all the same but the Melbourne narratives suggest that at their worst they were dangerous and potentially harmful. They had been a respectable, even fashionable option in the early twentieth century but were in decline by the 1970s – though deinstitutionalisation provided the opportunity for entrepreneurs to open new ones for former patients of psychiatric hospitals (Stansfield 2007). Lodgers did not have the legal protections of private tenants, including ‘exclusive use and occupation’. Landlords were entitled to hold duplicate keys to all rooms, on the grounds of cleaning and servicing, and could enter at any time (CURA 1979).

The Melbourne narrators were invested critics, and some knew where there were better rooms, but their main experience was of dirty, run down houses. ‘Most of them smell’, said Donna, 15; ‘bathrooms are real dirty’; ‘toilet for everyone’ (41–2). Dot, 73, complained of having no locks on kitchen cupboards so your things got stolen, rooms so tiny it was ‘standing room only’ once you were out of bed. Public space was always negotiated: Anna, 70, used the kitchen ‘after the prostitutes get home’ (92). Boarding houses were also dangerous, and the narratives reveal the ways in which women who may well have been traumatised by past experience were liable to retraumatising. They tell of intimidating landlords and menacing residents: in one place the landlord let himself into Dot’s room when she was in bed to accuse her of stealing; in another she was blamed for spots on the carpet that were there when she moved in. Just last night a man had come into the kitchen ‘with his thing out’ and she couldn’t ‘get rid of him’ (97). Lucy, 72, told of being ‘punched … in the eyes’ by a resident (95). Dianne felt safer sleeping out. Rooming could mean living with surveillance, from the prison-like rules of hostels, to the heavy police presence in boarding house precincts. Rhonda liked St Kilda but there were ‘always cops coming’ when ‘you just walk down the street’ (45).

And yet they needed these rooms with their affordable rents, which may explain why most kept their criticisms to past experience. Dot was the only informant openly critical of her current arrangements and she was insistent that the interviewer not tape her words. She thought she had a reputation for complaining and worried it would ‘get in the papers and they’d know’; ‘Always complainin’, that’s what they’d say’ … ‘I’d be thrown out on the streets wouldn’t I?’ (97). She may have been ‘paranoid’, but paranoia may have been the product of years of having no real privacy and having to perform in semi-public spaces, rituals that most people performed in safety, free from scrutiny.

Deficient and Self-hating?

The interviews can be read as a counter-narrative to Fraser’s assumption that homeless women were lacking personal resources and that their ‘vulnerability in the world’ had led them to internalise self-hatred. Before exploring the narratives, however, it is important to clarify the context of their construction. As oral historians have shown, no interview produces undiluted ‘fact’ – it is a one-off conversation, drawing on social and personal memory and shaped by participants’ expectations (Murphy 1986). Something of the authors’ expectations can be read in their descriptions of the women’s appearance and demeanour. A couple were ‘distant’ or ‘apathetic’ (47, 52, 70) but most were presented positively: quite a few were ‘friendly’; one ‘came across with overwhelming sincerity’ (64, 56) another had ‘a wicked sense of humour’ (94). These sympathetic descriptions reflect the authors’ commitment to a non-judgmental approach and the conviction that the difficulties the women faced were not of their own making. After all, this was before the discourse of choice and personal responsibility that came with neoliberalism threatened to obscure ‘the extent of choicelessness’ (Johnson 2003). One description of an Indigenous woman as having ‘a rather furtive sideways look’ and owing board to one of the hostels, however, points to the racist limits of white idealism. It stands out from the other comments, and may reflect what the authors acknowledged as differences in the ‘personal style’ of each researcher – the descriptions of the other two Indigenous women show no such disapproval (67, 33). But it also reinforces Indigenous women’s critique of 1970s feminism as largely a white middle-class movement (O’Shane 1976).

There is no space to do full justice to all the narratives here but they can be read to show something of the gendered workings of settler colonialism, migration, violence and sheer serendipity in the lives of their authors. In terms of settler colonialism, the narratives are limited because race was not a category of analysis in the study: the interplay of low paid work, child-care and violence in the lives of the Indigenous women interviewed is similar to that encountered by the white women, though it was very likely experienced differently. Two broad, inter-related patterns do emerge, however. Indigenous women were over-represented in this group: at 3 out of 18, they were considerably more than their 1% of the population at the time (ABS 2007). In addition, they all experienced the premature death of one or both parents: of 6 Indigenous parents, 5 died prematurely, compared with 8 of 30 non-Indigenous parents. The sample is small but it goes some way towards countering the assumptions of disfunction that have long beset Indigenous families, highlighting instead the relationship between parental mortality and homelessness. Indeed, one Indigenous woman made a point of how happy she was in her childhood home – ‘gee I was happy at the station’ – but both parents died when she was 19, when she had just had a baby to a violent man, and when she greatly needed their support (73-4).

The one migrant narrative evokes the impacts of war, displacement and state surveillance. Anna, born in Russia and aged ‘about 70’, was a chance encounter in the street. Hers was more ‘an outpouring’ than a linear story. She said nothing about when and how she came to Australia but repeatedly referred to how happy she was living with her grandmother as a child. Born at the turn of the twentieth century, her life spanned the October revolution, Stalinism, and two world wars: ‘my life is different to everyone else’s – very different. I can’t speak about it’ (91). She made several references to the police knowing ‘everything’ and did not want the interview to go on too long because ‘they see if you pass anything’. She was the only older woman who spoke openly about suicide – saying that she would go to the ‘dangerous place’ in the river if she could not find a job after her money ran out. But she presented herself as in control: ‘I have had a good life – all my family died young – I join them’ (91).

Almost all the women had experienced violence. Their stories are unique but continuities were strong, despite the wide age range. Mary, a 46-year-old white woman, presented a detailed account of her life that points to themes many shared. She was described as ‘at ease and friendly’ and ‘matter-of-fact’ except when her children were mentioned when she became ‘visibly upset’. Unlike most of the sample she was ‘very happy’ as a child but she had wanted to marry at 16, after which her mother put her in Abbotsford convent for ‘wayward’ girls. When she was released she married someone else ‘to get away’ but this man cheated on her so she left him even though she was pregnant (83). She took a job as a cook for a timber miller, married him and had two more children; she left when he started ‘to get violent’. She moved to Fitzroy with her children, worked as a barmaid and took in boarders; one of these would ‘go off the planet – you know. Bash me – wanted me to hop in bed’. When she was hospitalised by this man she decided it would be better for her children to be with her ex-husband: ‘it was heart-breaking, but I thought it would be better for them’ (84). This was a turning point. Her health started to suffer, her asthma got worse, and she started drinking heavily. Her last partner would catch up with her so she’d move: ‘he’s still around – never lets up’ (84). She was in and out of rooms, in and out of rehab: ‘when I get too sick with drink I get admitted’ (85).

Like many of the others, Mary’s life story highlights the intersections between gendered violence and feminised poverty. Born in the depression and with limited education, she experienced an institution that punished self-assertion in young women as ‘wayward’. She repartnered in the context of low paid work, was twice a victim of partner violence and was still being stalked. She relinquished her children after being hospitalised by her partner because she saw it in their interests to do so – it was after this that she started drinking heavily. Whatever personal resources she lacked is not clear, but what does emerge is that the cards stacked against her became weightier over time.

This is not to suggest that all the narratives followed an unremittingly downward trajectory. Luck can be seen playing out in the lives of some. Lucy, for example, married four times and though her first husband was a coercive controller and her fourth deserted her, she was happy with her 2nd and 3rd husbands – sadly, both died. But poverty meant they were all vulnerable – at worst, to a self-perpetuating cycle of state violence. Pat, aged 42, was described by the authors as ‘very neatly dressed’ with ‘a lovely smiling face and dancing eyes’: between adolescence and early adulthood she had been locked in a padded cell in a girls’ home, bashed by police after escaping from Pentridge, put into ‘the dungeons’ on bread and water at Fairlea prison and raped by a taxi driver: when she reported the rape, the police took no notice ‘because I’d been in gaol and had convictions and that’ (79–80).

The narratives call into question Fraser’s generalisation that, as ‘failed mothers’ homeless women had internalised self-hatred. Most of the older women had children who were, or had been, in care and most expressed their determination to get them back, or resume a relationship with them. This is not to deny that they suffered a stigma that may have engendered ‘shame and rage and self-defeating behaviour’, as social psychologist Kathleen Wells has put it: identity is always layered (Wells 2011). But their narratives emphasise that relinquishing their children was in the child’s best interests and are clear about the external factors that lead them to it. The dominant emotion they expressed was grief not shame.

Their awareness of the external factors working against them is also clear in their responses to a question about what changed their lives. For Therese it was her husband ‘playing around’ (89); for Kerry it was being sent to the Oakleigh reformatory; for Lisa it was her father’s violence. Lucy answered the question positively: her life changed when she got the pension (96). A few women articulated the lack of affordable housing as currently working against them. ‘Why doesn’t the government or the local Brotherhoods buy [houses], put people in them?’, Joan asked (78). Looking back on her life, Mary was the only respondent to this question who showed any ambiguity – and there were multiple layers in her response.

What changed my life was my mother putting me in Abbotsford instead of letting me get married. But I brought myself undone, I suppose, nobody else. But I believe in myself, I mean well and I’m pretty happy. (86)

Far from mired in guilt she recognised her own strengths and took responsibility for her own actions while recognising she had little control over the pivotal event in her life.

Concluding in Context

Homeless women were constructed as a problem population in Australia 30 years after homeless men, but there was a significant difference in the stance the later researchers took towards their subjects. Homeless men had been represented as broken individuals, inimical to progress, pitiable at best (O’Brien 2022). While some of this infused some research on homeless women, the larger structural framework within which feminists worked recognised that homelessness was a gendered experience and that women were vulnerable to dangers and shaming that men did not face; they were critical of women’s marginalisation in the government’s new programme and recognised that the judgmentalism of those providing support was actively harmful. However, the strand of feminist research that reinforced the older male-oriented understandings of ‘cause’ and accepted homelessness as rough sleeping, played a part in obscuring the range of ways women could experience homelessness and the range of long-term responses needed.

The reports discussed in this article provide an entrée into the complex understandings that feminist advocates brought to homeless women at this pivotal time. The Melbourne study broadened the orthodox view of homelessness and appreciated the strategies women developed to minimise their vulnerability. It showed that women in rooms were not necessarily safe, it assumed they had a right to housing and, in elevating their voices, it refuted deficit theories of homelessness and produced a document that points to the intersecting impacts of colonialism, war, migration, class, and misogyny in the intimate lives of women. But it was not written to the government and the broader definition it posited remained largely peripheral. The Sydney report shows that the dominant understandings of homelessness as personal deficit were not just difficult to shift, they could be renewed by the terminology of addiction and by a totalising interpretation of patriarchy. Homelessness as deficit had long assumed that temporary shelter was the best homeless men could expect: this report’s awareness of women’s vulnerability gave the need for such shelter a heightened sense of importance without considering that they might be subjects of housing. At the same time, the urgent needs of women leaving violence heightened the appeal of temporary accommodation as a viable mode of support.

A short history of the following decades suggests the government preference for the older framework. Temporary accommodation, with all its insecurity and distress, remained the primary response to homelessness (for men as well as women) until 2008. Refuges for a range of women – including young women, Indigenous women, and women with ‘special needs’ – grew rapidly but they were never sufficient to need (AHRC 1980). In 1985 the Hawke government streamlined and regularised funding for the homelessness sector through the Supported Accommodation Assistance Program (SAAP), confirming temporary accommodation and services as its core functions. It was only in 2008 that the Rudd labour government sought to introduce measures that would significantly reduce homelessness, rather than only manage it (Parsell and Jones 2014). These measures were not sufficient to stop homelessness increasing, however, and the election of the Coalition in 2013 saw housing and homelessness recede as government priorities (MacKenzie 2017). All through this period scholars and service providers decried the lack of ‘exit points’ for people using homelessness services (Coleman and Fopp 2014). They did not deny the need for crisis accommodation for people with high and complex needs but argued that transitional housing should be accompanied by rapid permanent housing (Bullen 2010b). As the homelessness sector grew, however, public housing became increasingly residualised and underfunded. The number of households on public housing waiting lists almost doubled between 1982 and 1992 and, as a percentage of all housing stock, public housing dropped from 5.7 in 1984 to 3.8% in 2010 (Hayward 1996; Toohey 2014).

Old gender paradigms and the focus on rough sleeping also persisted, working against women’s chances of being rehoused in the context of profound under-supply. A recent study found that ‘chronically homeless women’ continue to use strategies of concealment, such as couch surfing, or sleeping in a car or in a place they feel more safely unseen. They also continue to avoid some services because of limits on their autonomy or because they feel unsafe, which means they are literally not ‘counted’ as homeless and often overlooked for housing (Bullen 2021). In a system where service organisations play an important role in assisting their clients to housing, some women, such as older single women, lack such services (Darab and Hartman 2013). Nor can services ensure their clients’ housing: victims of domestic violence remain in or return to violent relationships because of the lack of social housing in some areas (Flanagan et al. 2019).

The feminists who argued for more refuges for women in the 1970s can hardly be blamed for the on-going preference of successive governments for temporary accommodation, much less for the decline of public housing. Indeed, over the next decades feminists lobbied for women’s housing in the refuge movement, in squatting campaigns, and in the peak body ‘Shelter’ – and with some success (Watson 1988). The appeal of temporary accommodation to governments in a 3-year election cycle is clear: less expensive and more flexible than large-scale housing projects it was also in keeping with the ethos of self-help that came to infuse welfare. But feminists were important players in this field where women had long been overlooked, and the Sydney report was a passionate call for them to be seen. In construing ‘the homeless woman’ as a unitary figure, inherently damaged, it shows, not just the intersection of different forms of professional knowledge, but how they could be shaped by and reinforce old tropes of ‘the woman vagrant’ as aberrant and ‘brutalised’. The salient point is how deeply embedded those tropes were, how readily they could be redeployed and how resilient they remain: contemporary media representations of homeless women still reinforce a dichotomy between the ‘undeserving’ addict and the ‘deserving’ woman with children (Lyons and Smedley 2021).

The ideas encapsulated in the Melbourne report also live on. The approaches it advocated – more equal relationships between client and practitioner, a focus on personal strength rather than pathology, and ‘therapeutic techniques’ such as empathy and decreasing self-blame – came to be seen as basic to feminist social work over the next decades (Fook 1986). Its privileging of the voices of homeless women also foreshadowed more recent attempts to counter the institutionalised silencing of homeless women by professionals and the media (Speer 2021). More than this, the report and the narratives it has preserved, provide a methodological reference point for contemporary studies of ‘homeless identities’. They clearly underline the importance of gender as a category of analysis in such studies, but also point to the value of analysing ‘the interview’ as a product of its time. Some housing theorists have rightly argued that an historical sensibility reminds us that ‘current policies and theories do not occur outside time’ but are ‘temporally situated, contingent and contextual’ (Flanagan and Jacobs 2019, 196). Of relevance here is the pattern emerging from recent studies in which interviewees seem to express more ambiguity, more self-blame and negativity, a greater desire to take ‘personal responsibility’ for their own choices, than those in the 1970s Melbourne study (Parker and Fopp 2004; Zufferey and Kerr 2004; Parsell 2018). Indeed, a study of Centrelink recipients published in 2011 found that the largest group of those with views about the welfare system thought it was too lenient and encouraged dependency, even as they required its support (Murphy et al. 2011).

To note this is not to query the authenticity of the recent interviews, nor deny the ‘agency’ of those being interviewed by assuming they had unthinkingly imbibed some sort of fixed ‘neoliberal’ orthodoxy. It is to suggest that, since ‘the interview’ is inevitably shaped by its time, being alive to the context in which it was constructed may provide a clearer understanding of its value. The 1970s interviews were conducted when social democratic idealism still had currency and, since its precepts infused most interviews, the narrators revealed the constraints on their agency in a context where they felt free to articulate them. They had a knowledge of homelessness and housing that was not just intimate and profound but clear-sighted: they speak to our time. In this, they add a new dimension to the growing recognition that people experiencing homelessness are the real ‘experts’ despite their ‘epistemic displacement’ (Speer 2021, 1). They provide insight, not only into what homelessness means, but into how and why it is perpetuated.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [grant number DP180100354].

Notes

1 I have not been able to verify that the DSS commissioned this report but, since the copy in the State Library of NSW is attached to a covering letter from the DSS to the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS), it seems very likely.