Bookshelf: Homeless Voices

“A Roof Over My Head”:
Homeless Women and the Shelter Industry
By Jean Calterone Williams ’88
University Press of Colorado, 2003
222 pages • $29.95

In her new book “A Roof Over My Head”: Homeless Women and the Shelter Industry, Jean Calterone Williams ’88 divides us into two groups. There are those who have a home, a house, an address; and there are those who don’t.

According to Williams, an assistant professor of political science at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, this distinction gives us differing perspectives on the meaning of homelessness. Those who have a home tend to think of homelessness as simply a result of poverty. Williams, however, urges her readers to understand homelessness from the point of view of the homeless. She explains that homelessness is a condition brought on not simply by poverty, but by a complex convergence of situations.

This, she acknowledges, is not a new idea, but most of the existing ethnographic studies do not sufficiently address the circumstances homeless women face that men do not, such as domestic violence and child rearing. To fill this void, Williams embarked on a two-year study of women in the “shelter industry.” To record women’s perspectives about why they become homeless, she visited homeless shelters, battered women’s shelters and antipoverty agencies in Phoenix, Arizona. Her intent was to address the causes of homelessness through the voices of homeless women.

Williams divides her book into chapters on the issues and chapters that illuminate homeless women’s personal stories. Though she uses accepted ethnographic methods of participant observation and interviews, she is upfront about the limitations of her research. She explains in her introduction that her study should not be viewed as a “pure or unadulterated view of homelessness, nor should these women’s interviews be interpreted at ‘authentic’ or pure.”

“Rich in paradox and contradiction, these stories indicate a great diversity in personal experience,” Williams says. “I do not claim to offer the “homeless point of view”; rather, these voices are multiple and conflicting.”

It’s easy to compare her work to Barbara Ehrenreich’s recent Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. While both scholars positioned themselves in a niche of society to gain a greater appreciation of women’s struggles, Williams showed more pluck by staying immersed longer than Ehrenreich’s three-month spell. And while she didn’t come away with a speaking tour, this reader hopes that Williams’ conversations with homeless women reside on university course reading lists for a long time. They, at least, should have a home.

—Sarah Dolinar