![]() At the time of the story, she was working a part-time job, earning $8 an hour, and receiving Social Security payments, but she could not afford an apartment. In May 2008, CNN carried a story about 67-year-old Barbara Harvey, the mother of three grown children, who was living in a car in a Santa Barbara parking lot after being laid off from her job as a loan processor. Department of Housing and Urban Development only indicates that female adults make up 31.7 percent of the homeless who enter shelters, although 83 percent of the families that enter shelters are headed by women.Īnecdotal evidence provides powerful examples. The March 2008 report on homelessness from the U.S. Information about the homeless generally does not capture figures on prior income. Women who were once earning steady incomes and living in comfortable and supposedly secure circumstances are losing their homes.Įxact statistics indicating the number of middle-class women driven to homelessness are hard to come by. Female veterans account for four percent of the homeless population, according to a report in the July 2003 American Journal of Public Health. Not only battered women or single women with two and three children take to the streets and shelters. With the rise in mortgage foreclosures and the slow but visible increase in unemployment, evidence suggests that middle-class women are vulnerable. One never imagined that she could be you. In the 1970s and ‘80s, when homelessness became epidemic in New York City, one rarely imagined that the woman huddling in a doorway or sleeping over a grate could have been your well-heeled neighbor just yesterday. It’s been left to 20th and 21st-century playwrights, practitioners of a more nitty-gritty dramaturgy than their theatrical ancestors, to portray the ugliness of surviving on the street. “There’s Nora,” he said.īut Ibsen, considered the father of modern realism, never wrote a play about the subject. Ibsen reportedly pointed to a crumpled homeless woman sitting on a bench. But what happens to her then? A friend of the Norwegian playwright, walking in the park with him one day, asked the same question. Ibsen’s Nora famously slams the door and leaves her husband in a defiant exit. She had just been evicted from her apartment, she told me, after losing her job and not being able to pay her rent. ![]() She could have been in her late fifties or early sixties, and she looked healthy and well-groomed. Each cart was crammed with her personal items and each was covered with an industrial-size, black plastic bag. She would move one, then stop and move another, herding them, as it were, down the sidewalk. The woman was inching a number of upright shopping carts along the pavement. Recently, while walking on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where I live, I saw a woman who made me think of Nora from Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, more than a hundred years later, of course, and considerably older. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |