Women
In the last decades of the 20th century, the number of women in the homeless population had increased dramatically and grown faster than the number of men. In the early 21st century, the numbers of homeless women continued to grow. In 2008 in one sample, women represented 26% of the respondents surveyed, compared to 24% in 2007.
Homeless women between the ages of 18 and 44 are between 5 and 31 times more at risk of dying than those women who have homes. Homeless women over the age of 44, however, are healthier than homeless men of the same age, and are negligibly more at risk of dying than housed women. Psychologically, however, homeless women in their fifties suffer from troubles and chronic diseases from which their housed counterparts only begin to suffer in their seventies. Despite their comparable psychological condition, elderly housing assistance is not available to these homeless women. Between 3.1 and 4.4% of homeless women in the United States are veterans of the armed services. 57% of these have availed of the Veterans Affairs' healthcare services.
Adult partner abuse, foster care, and childhood sexual abuse are all more likely to have been experienced by homeless women than by their male counterparts. Domestic violence is the direct cause of homelessness for over half of all homeless women in the United States. Approximately three quarters of the women who attempt to avail of domestic violence shelter beds are turned away in major American cities. These victims of domestic violence are often excluded from homelessness studies, despite the lack of livable conditions in their homes.
It Was a Wonderful Life, a 1993 documentary film narrated by Jodie Foster, chronicles the lives of six articulate, educated, but otherwise hidden homeless women as they struggle from day to day.
Read more about this topic: Homelessness In The United States
Famous quotes containing the word women:
“The mother must teach her son how to respect and follow the rules. She must teach him how to compete successfully with the other boys. And she must teach him how to find a woman to take care of him and finish the job she began of training him how to live in a family. But no matter how good a job a woman does in teaching a boy how to be a man, he knows that she is not the real thing, and so he tends to exaggerate the differences between men and women that she embodies.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“There is a pride, a self-love, in human minds that will seldom be kept so low as to make men and women humbler than they ought to be.”
—Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)
“The primary imperative for women who intend to assume a meaningful and decisive role in today’s social change is to begin to perceive themselves as having an identity and personal integrity that has as strong a claim for being preserved intact as that of any other individual or group.”
—Margaret Adams (b. 1916)