The Women Outside: Meanings and Myths of Homelessness

by Stephanie Golden

Drawing upon four years' experience as a volunteer in a shelter, Stephanie Golden offers a stark and startling new portrait of homeless women. Taking us inside shelters, out on the streets, and into the lives of homeless women, The Women Outside uses wide-ranging scholarship to integrate a number of perspectives—historical, sociological, psychological, literary, and mythic—in a wholly original, incisive investigation.

Genres: Nonfiction

329 pages, Paperback

First published March 25, 1992

About the author

Got the Girl Scouts' Writer badge (the only one that interested me) when I was 12: that signaled the future. I began writing fiction, but discovered that what really compelled me was literary nonfiction—especially once I developed a way to use a central image as a method of analysis.

An image constrains and focuses thoughts while still allowing great freedom in moving around within it: you can come at your material from many different directions without losing coherence, since the analysis acquires its form from the structure of the image.

I used this method for both my literary nonfiction books:

• For The Women Outside, a study of homeless and marginal women, it was the figure of the witch.

• For Slaying the Mermaid, about women and self-sacrifice, it was Hans Christian Anderson's Little Mermaid.

Literary nonfiction didn't pay the rent, but I like writing books, so I became a book collaborator and wrote five other books with experts.

And since for a freelancer diversifying = security, I started writing all sorts of other things: magazine articles, newsletters, reports for nonprofits, grant proposals, training manuals, and lately websites.

Reviews

[Sallie Reynolds · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, which I first read when it came out, brings to life a time when so many of the women of the 1970s whom I knew in New York City - restless, talented, sensitive, feeling valueless in the society we lived in - became aware of the many homeless women around us. We called them "bag ladies." We would get off the subway, on our way to work we didn't love, that didn't satisfy but was necessary, and meet the open hand and often howling mind of a woman in rags, hungry for far more than our spare change could ever buy for her. Sometimes she would shout at us, whether we gave her money or not. Sometimes she was clearly lost in a mind-world far far away. We would say to each other, in whispers, "I could be that bag lady." And we meant it.

We were struggling to find a place, work that was meaningful, a sense of community, in a city as big as a not-small country, and she was struggling to stay alive. She terrified us. We felt that we were slowly losing control, slowly sliding into her life. We felt helpless to prevent it.

Most of us didn't become homeless, no matter how near madness we skated. We had enough sense of self to do whatever it took to survive and to continue to move on. But we didn't forget these women. We had quite limited access to education and opportunities that would help us achieve meaningful and secure lives. But whatever we lacked (that our brothers did not), we had far more than these women did. (Why us? Why them? There but for . . .) Still, too often, meeting the outstretched hand and the wild eyes, we flinched away. Not because we didn't feel but because we felt all too rawly.

Stephanie Golden did not flinch. She worked in a shelter for many years, exploring the real lives of these women even as she sought the connections between them and herself. What could help each of them get food and shelter? The women on the street seemed not just "outside," but inside-out. Why were they there? And why did other, "normal" women feel such fear around them?

This book brings a journey to life. What is most significant is that while many people who seek to connect the outside with the inside end up telling their own stories, Stephanie tells the stories of the women themselves. This book won't comfort those of us who have lived many decades feeling "outside" and afraid. But it will bring some healthy truths to our thoughts, and some cognizance of the likenesses between those women and ourselves. And it will give us more than a hint of what is solely their own.

Today, in 2014, on the streets of all cities, there are more homeless people than ever, most driven there by cataclysms quite different from those that flayed the haunting women of the past. Their pain is also palpable, and we surely should go far beyond hand-outs to help people who have fallen prey to a society that is uncaring. Three strikes and you're out applies to more than baseball and the criminal world. Our society is unkind - there is no longer a meaningful safety net for anyone, let alone lost, wandering bag ladies. This book will let you see into the new lost, the women of the past, and into yourself.

By waking you up, it can make you kinder - perhaps even willing to work for a more compassionate society.