Homelessness as a Feminist Issue: Revisiting the 1970s

Homelessness among women is a pressing social problem and the barriers to solving it are difficult to shift. A number of scholars have argued that, in addition to the gender pay gap, unpaid labour and family violence, the problem lies in the fact that responses to homelessness are still shaped by conceptualisations that developed when it was seen as a problem of white adult men. And yet there has been no close analysis of how and why these conceptualisations took root, and how they were reinforced and perpetuated. Focusing on the pivotal 1970s, when homeless women were first constituted a 'problem' in Australia and feminism became a compelling political force, this article examines how feminists both challenged and reinforced those conceptualisations. It argues that feminist responses were shaped by different forms of professional knowledge which led to divergent outcomes, and it uses a rare cache of interviews to show how homeless women's narratives refute the assumptions on which old ideas were built.