The Lives of Homeless Women- by Elliot Liebow

I thought maybe everyone should read this article. This was an article I read for my sociology class. I thought this was perfect because everyone knows right now times are tough! This may uplift some people's spirits and step back and say that maybe you don't have it as bad as you thought. READ THIS ARTICLE! There are still some good people in the world, kindof hard to believe you have to read for yourself to believe.

The Lives of
Homeless Women

One of the main topics in Chapter 1 of Core Concepts is the methods that sociologists use
to do their research. A common method is participant observation combined with interviewing.
When I was doing research on the homeless, I used this combination. I slept in
homeless shelters across the nation—in about a dozen U.S. cities and one in Canada.
There and on the streets and in the alleys of these many skid rows, and even on a streetcar
and in cafes, I conducted what seemed to be endless interviews. The research was
emotionally draining. On dark streets and in back alleys, I had to continuously watch out
for danger that appeared to lurk around every corner. One afternoon, as sirens
screamed, I squatted next to a building, dictating into my tape recorder. I described the
arrival of the police and medics to aid a homeless man who was lying bleeding on the
sidewalk. He had been attacked by another homeless man.
Thousands of people live on our city streets. These discards of the advanced technological
society have been left behind in our culturally mandated frenetic pursuit after
material wealth. Like others, Elliot Liebow, a researcher with the National Institute of
Mental Health, had seen these disheveled, unwelcome people sitting in parks and on
stoops, sleeping next to shopping carts, sorting through trash bins, and begging on the
city streets. Like others, he wondered what their life was like. And like a few of us—very
few—he decided to find out firsthand—by experiencing their world. He, too, left his comfortable,
upper-middle-class home and joined the street people. This is his engrossing
account of that experience.
Thinking Critically
As you read this selection, ask yourself:
1. Liebow is reluctant to say that any of the homeless women he studied were mentally
ill. Why does he have this reluctance? Based on what he says in this article, do you
think any of these women were mentally ill? Why or why not?
2. How do you think that the problem of homelessness can be solved? You must be
practical; that is, try to come up with workable solutions.
READING 2 THE LIVES OF HOMELESS WOMEN 11
This is a participant observer study of single, homeless women in emergency shelters
in a small city just outside Washington, D.C. In participant observation, the researcher
tries to participate as fully as possible in the lives of the people being
studied. Of course, there are obvious and severe limits to how well a man with a
home and family can put himself in the place of homeless women. One simply goes
where they go, gets to know them over time as best one can, and tries very hard to
see the world from their perspective.
It is often said that, in participant observation studies, the researcher is the research
instrument. So is it here. Everything reported about the women in this study
has been selected by me and filtered through me, so it is important that I tell you
something about myself and my prejudices as well as how this study came about. Indeed,
I feel obliged to tell you more than is seemly and more than you may want to
know, but these are things that the women themselves knew about me and that had
an important if unknown influence on my relationship with them.
In a real sense, I backed into this study, which took shape, more or less, as I
went along. In 1984, I learned that I had cancer and a very limited life expectancy. I
did not want to spend my last months on the 12th floor of a government office
building, so at 58 I retired on disability from my job of 20-some years as an anthropologist
with the National Institute of Mental Health.
I looked well, felt well, and had a lot of time on my hands, so I became a volunteer
at a soup kitchen that had recently opened. I worked there one night a week.
In the early part of the evening, I helped serve food or just sat around with the men
and women who had come there, usually eating with them. In case of trouble, I tried
to keep the peace. Later I went upstairs to “the counselor’s office,” where I met with
people who needed assistance in getting shelter for the night. For the next hour or
so, I called around to the various shelters in the county or in downtown Washington,
D.C., trying to locate and reserve sleeping space for the men and women who
needed it.
I enjoyed the work and the people at the soup kitchen, but this was only one
night a week, so I became a volunteer at The Refuge, an emergency shelter for homeless
women. This, too, was one night a week, from 6:30 to 10:00, and involved sleeping
overnight twice a month. I picked this shelter because I had visited there briefly the
year before and liked the feel of it. Here, along with three other volunteers, my job
was to help prepare the food (usually just heat the main dishes and make a salad); help
serve the food; distribute towels, soap, and other sundries on request; socialize with
3. Assume that we will continue to have homeless people. How can we improve the way
they are treated? Cite specific instances from the reading that you would try to solve.
From Tell Them Who I Am: The Lives of Homeless Women by Elliot Liebow. Reprinted and edited with
permission of The Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group. Copyright © 1993
by Elliot Liebow. All rights reserved.
12 CHAPTER 1 THE SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
the women; keep order; and keep a daily log that included the names of all the women
present and their time of arrival.
Almost immediately, I found myself enjoying the company of the women. I
was awed by the enormous effort that most of them made to secure the most elementary
necessities and decencies of life that the rest of us take for granted. And I
was especially struck by their sense of humor, so at odds with any self-pity—the
ability to step back and laugh at oneself, however wryly. One evening, soon after I
started working at the shelter, several of us remained at the table to talk after finishing
dinner. Pauline turned to me and said, in a stage whisper, making sure that Hilda
would hear her, “Hilda has a Ph.D.”
Hilda laughed. “No,” she said, “I don’t have a Ph.D., but I do have a bachelor’s
degree in biology.” She paused, then began again. “You know,” she said, “all
my life I wanted to be an MD and now, at the age of 54, I finally made it. I’m a
Manic Depressive.”
Seduced by the courage and the humor of the women, and by the pleasure of
their company, I started going to the shelter four and sometimes five days a week.
(For the first two years, I also kept my one-night-a-week job with the soup kitchen.)
Probably because it was something I was trained to do, or perhaps our of plain
habit, I decided to take notes.
“Listen,” I said at the dinner table one evening, after getting permission to do
a study from the shelter director. “I want your permission to take notes. I want to go
home at night and write down what I can remember about the things you say and
do. Maybe I’ll write a book about homeless women.”
Most of the dozen or so women there nodded their heads or simply shrugged.
All except Regina. Her acceptance was conditional. “Only if you promise not to
publish before I do,” she said. Believing that neither one of us, for different reasons,
would ever publish anything in the future, I readily agreed.1
It is difficult to be precise about how I was perceived by the women. I am 6'1"
and weigh about 175 pounds. I had a lot of white hair but was otherwise nondescript.
I dressed casually, often in corduroy pants, shirt, and cardigan. The fact that
I was Jewish did not seem to matter much one way or another so far as I could tell.
Most of the women probably liked having me around. Male companionship
was generally in short supply and the women often made a fuss about the few male
volunteers. I would guess that there were as many women who actively sought me
out as there were women who avoided me. The fact that I had written a book that
was available at the library (three or four women took the trouble to read it) enhanced
my legitimacy in their eyes.2
Principally, I think, the women saw me as an important resource. I had money
and a car, and by undertaking to write a book, I had made it my business to be with
them. I routinely lent out $2, $5, $10, or even $20 on request to the handful who
asked: I told them I had set aside a certain amount as a revolving fund and I could
only keep lending money if they kept returning it. This worked fairly well.
There were a few women, of course, who would never be in a position to return
the money, and this made for a problem. It would have been patronizing simply
to make a gift of the money; they wanted to be borrowers, not beggars, and I was
just as eager as they to avoid a demeaning panhandler/donor relationship. But I did
READING 2 THE LIVES OF HOMELESS WOMEN 13
not want them to be embarrassed or to avoid me simply because they couldn’t repay
a loan, nor did I want to shut them off from borrowing more. My solution was to
reassure these women I had no immediate need for the money and could wait indefinitely
for repayment.
Some of the women would perhaps characterize me as a friend, but I am not
certain how deep or steadfast this sense of friendship might be. One day, Regina and
I were talking about her upcoming trial about two months away. I had already
agreed to accompany her to the courtroom and serve as an advisor, but Regina
wanted further reassurance.
“You will be there, won’t you?” she said.
As a way of noting the profundity that nothing in life is certain, I said, jokingly,
“It’s not up to me, it’s up to The Man Upstairs.”
“Well,” she said, “if you die before the trial, you will ask one of your friends
to help me, won’t you?” I looked hard at her to see if she was joking, too. She
wasn’t. She was simply putting first things first.
One or two of the women did say something like “If you weren’t married,
would you give me a run for my money?” Neither “yes” nor “no” was a suitable response,
but it usually sufficed for me to say (and mean), “I think you are a very nice
person.”
I tried to make myself available for driving people to Social Services, a job interview,
a clinic or hospital, a cemetery, to someone’s house, to another shelter, to
help them move their belongings, or on other personal errands. With my consent,
several women used my name as a personal reference for jobs or housing, and a few
used my home as a mailing address for income tax refunds or other business.
Several of the women got to know my two daughters, both of whom came to
The Refuge a few evenings each during the winters. One daughter was engaged to be
married and her fiancé also came a few times. These visits helped strengthen my ties
to those women who knew my daughters by face and name. They could ask me how
my wife, Harriet, or Elisabeth and Jessica and Eric were doing, and my subsequent
participation in discussions about family or child-rearing was much more personal
and immediate as a result.
My association with the women was most intense during the winter of 1984–
85, all of 1986, much of 1987, and the winter of 1987–88. Thereafter, I slackened
off, partly for health reasons and partly because I had already collected more notes
than I knew what to do with.3 I continued to go to the shelters intermittently, and
several of the women called me regularly at home. It was also at this time that I
started playing around with the notes to see how I might eventually make sense of
them.
In general, I have tried to avoid labeling any of the women as “mentally ill,”
“alcoholic,” “drug addicted,” or any other characterization that is commonly used
to describe—or, worse, to explain—the homeless person. Judgments such as these
are almost always made against a background of homelessness. If the same person
were seen in another setting, the judgment might be altogether different. Like you, I
know people who drink, people who do drugs, and bosses who have tantrums and
treat their subordinates like dirt. They all have good jobs. Were they to become
homeless, some of them would surely also become “alcoholics,” “addicts,” or
14 CHAPTER 1 THE SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
“mentally ill.” Similarly, if some of the homeless women who are now so labeled
were to be magically transported to a more usual and acceptable setting, some of
them—not all, of course—would shed their labels and take their places with the rest
of us somewhere on the spectrum of normality.
The reader may be puzzled by the short shrift given here to mental illness. This
was no oversight. I have no training as a mental health professional so it is not always
clear to me who is mentally ill and who is not. There were always some
women who acted crazy or whom most considered crazy, and the women themselves
often agreed with the public at large that many homeless people are mentally ill.
From the beginning, however, I paid little attention to mental illness, partly because
I had difficulty recognizing it, and partly for other reasons. Sometimes mental
illness seemed to be “now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t” phenomenon; some of the
women were fine when their public assistance checks arrived, but became increasingly
“symptomatic” as the month progressed and their money (security?) diminished,
coming full circle when the next check arrived.4 Others had good or bad days
or weeks but with no obvious pattern or periodicity, although one woman linked
her down period to her menstrual cycle. With a little patience on my part, almost all
the women with mental or emotional problems were eventually and repeatedly accessible.
Even on “bad” days, perhaps especially on “bad” days, these women sometimes
said things that seemed to come, uncensored, from the depths of their
emotional lives.
It seems to me that those women who may have been mentally ill (or alcoholic
or drug addicted) by one or another standard were homeless for exactly the same
proximal reason that everyone else was homeless: they had no place to live. Similarly,
their greatest need of the moment was the same as everyone else’s: to be assured
of a safe, warm place to sleep at night, one or more hot meals a day, and the
presence, if not the companionship, of fellow human beings. Given this perspective
and my purposes, which and how many of the women were mentally ill was not a
critical issue.
Whatever one’s view of mental illness, it is probably true that the more one
gets to know about a person, the easier it is to put oneself in that person’s place or
to understand his or her viewpoint, and the less reason one has for thinking of that
person or treating that person as mentally ill.
This perspective—indeed, participant observation itself—raises the age-old
problem of whether anyone can understand another or put oneself in another’s
place. Many thoughtful people believe that a sane person cannot know what it is to
be crazy, that a white man cannot understand a black man, a Jew cannot see
through the eyes of a Christian, a man through the eyes of a woman, and so forth in
both directions. In an important sense, of course, and to a degree, this is certainly
true; in another sense, and to a degree, it is surely false, because the logical extension
of such a view is that no one can know another, that only John Jones can know John
Jones, in which case social life would be impossible.
I do not mean that a man with a home and family can see and feel the world as
homeless women see and feel it. I do mean, however, that it is reasonable and useful
to try to do so. Trying to put oneself in the place of the other lies at the heart of the
social contract and of social life itself...
READING 2 THE LIVES OF HOMELESS WOMEN 15
In the early months, I sometimes tried to get Betty or one of the other women
to see things as I saw them. One night Betty waited half an hour in back of the library
for a bus that never came. She was convinced this was deliberate and personal
abuse on the part of the Metro system. Metro was out to get her, she said. “But how
did Metro know you were waiting for a bus at that time?” I asked. Betty shook her
head in pity of me. “Well, Elliot, I was there on the street, right there in public, in the
open! How could they not see me waiting for that damn bus?”
Fairly quickly, I learned not to argue with Betty but simply to relax and marvel
at her end-of-the-month ingenuity. (“End-of-the-month” because that’s when her
public assistance money ran out and when she was most bitter at the way the world
was treating her. At that time, a $10 or $20 loan could dramatically reduce or even
eliminate her paranoid thoughts.) Once, when her food stamps had not come, even
two days after Judy had received hers, Betty dryly observed that this was further
proof that Richman County was trying to rid itself of homeless women. “They give
Judy Tootie her food stamps so she’ll eat herself to death [Judy weighed 300
pounds]. They won’t give me mine so I’ll starve to death.” She got no argument
from me. I had learned to go with the flow.
Sometimes I annoyed or even angered some of the women. When Louise told
me that some of the women were following her around all day and harassing her, I
asked her why they did these things. “You’re just like the state’s attorney,” she said,
“always asking for reasons. Whenever I tell him that someone assaulted me, he always
asks me why they did it. People with criminal minds don’t need a reason to do
something. That’s what makes them criminals.”
...I think of Betty and Louise and many of the other women as friends. As a
friend, I owe them friendship. Perhaps I also owe them something because I have so
much and they have so little, but I do not feel under any special obligation to them
as research subjects. Indeed, I do not think of them as “research subjects.” Since
they knew what I was trying to do and allowed me to do it, they could just as well
be considered collaborators in what might fairly be seen as a cooperative enterprise.
NOTES
1. Let the record show that now, some seven-plus years later, I have her permission to
go ahead.
2. Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men.
3. For the same reason, I stopped taking life histories. After the women had known me
for a few months, I took about 20 life histories on tape, often at the request of the women
themselves and over a period of two years or so. Some of these lasted several hours over two
or three sessions and I found myself accumulating more information than I could handle.
4. Many schizophrenics are completely lucid for long periods of time, and their
thoughts and behavior are completely indistinguishable from those of normals. Even
Bleuler...asserted that there were certain very important cognitive processes...that were
frequently identical among schizophrenics and normals. “In many important respects,
then, an insane person may be completely sane” (emphasis added). Morris Rosenberg, “A
Symbolic Interactionist View of Psychosis,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 25,
no. 3 (September 1984), p. 291.

My Reflection

I learned that…by reading this article “The lives of homeless women” by Elliot Liebow not everyone in this homeless shelter was metal ill or addicts. I also learned one of the women in the shelter has a bachelor’s degree in biology. She stated “I wanted to become an MD and now, at age 54, I finally made it. I’m a manic depressive.” I also learned a lot about these women and their sense of humor, even though living in a shelter some still put on a smile. I also learned that Elliot did not judge these women. He didn’t judge them because they were homeless he seen through that and kept them company and gave them someone to talk to. He was a male guidance most of these women needed.
I was surprised that… Elliot Liebow volunteered at the homeless shelter about five times a week. Giving the okay by these women I was surprised they allowed him to take notes. He really got attached to these women whether it was loaning them money, or finding another shelter for them to stay the night. Elliot never gave up on these women. Although he had cancer this was his passion. Helping these women was routine to him. I was also surprise he got his family involved; knowing it was important to him his daughter and daughters fiancée volunteered a couple of times. Elliot never put any pressure on the women who he gave a loan too. Whether it was a dollar here and five dollars there Elliot didn’t mind when the women could return the money. Elliot was not only a great volunteer but a great friend!
I discovered that… In this article not everyone put on a smile and was happy. He talks about a women names Betty who wasn’t too friendly. Betty always thought someone was out to get her. “Once, when her food stamps had not come, even two days after Judy had received hers, Betty dryly observed that this was further proof that Richman County was trying to rid itself of homeless women. They give Judy Tootie her food stamps so she’ll eat herself to death, they won’t give me mine so I’ll starve to death.” Perfect example of her thinking everyone’s out to get her. She didn’t appreciate Elliot’s help.
I was disappointed that…Elliot didn’t tell us what happened to the women. I have a few questions that need to be answered such as did some women get jobs? How is Elliot and his cancer? I was also disappointed that he gave money to some women and didn’t return it back to him. Even though some couldn’t afford to give it back, and he knew that, it’s just the right thing to do is talk with him and apologize Elliot would understand.