Deborah R. Connolly is an advocate for the homeless and a senior research associate at Edgewood Center for Children
and Families in San Francisco. She recently taught cultural anthropology at the University of Missouri, Kansas
City.
Summary
A first-person look at the challenges and cultural perceptions confronting homeless women-now in paperback!
Homeless Mothers follows the lives of mothers on the margins and asks where they fit in the increasingly black-and-white
model of motherhood set up by society. Their voices, so rarely heard and so often ignored, resonate throughout
this book. Both an anthropologist in the field and a social worker on the job, Deborah R. Connolly is ideally placed
to draw out these women's life stories. Using their own words, by turns eloquent and awkward, poignant and harsh,
she maps the perilous territory between the promise of childhood and the hard reality of motherhood on the street.
What emerges is a glimpse of the cultural, class, gender, and economic challenges these women experience, a glimpse
as real for us as the headlines and stereotypes that so often displace homeless mothers and consign them to silence.
"Here I am thinking, 'Okay, a shelter.' Now I'm gonna walk in this room and there's gonna be like cots everywhere
and I'm scared to death. . . . What's gonna happen?" -from Homeless Mothers
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Key Figures
Introduction
1. Kristy: A Narrative
2. Motherly Things
3. Precarious Lives
4. "Patches on the Wound": Politics and Dynamics at Westside Community Center
5. "Don't Feed the Alligators": Debating Welfare
6. Leaving the Field
Notes
Bibliography
Index
