Homeless Women Analysis

In my opinion, I am very lucky to have had a roof over my head for my entire life, so far. My parents are what I consider to be very hard working people and I believe myself to be lucky for having them always pay the bills and provide not only a house for me to live in, but also the life that I have become accustomed too. By no means is my family incredibly wealthy, but in my opinion and in comparison to the women in the article “Fear, Romance and Transience in the Lives of Homeless Women”, my family is significantly better off. This article focuses on the lives of three women who are homeless and explores their struggles and triumphs of the life that they live.
The reason that I believe myself to be currently better off than the women in the article is because I have a house to go home to every night. Although these women have at one point have had house with a roof

over their head, they currently do not. Being homeless is more of a foreign concept to myself because even though I am aware of its existence and prevalence, I have never personally experienced it, and quite often do not think of it at all. This is because it is not my version of normality. In the article “The Social Construction of Normality” by Sophie Freud, there are three different definitions of normality that are mentioned. They include the statistical mode, normality as a mental health ideal and the conventional behaviours that are set by community standards (Freud, 1999, p. 335). These definitions help to explain why I do not think about being homeless or homelessness in general. Since I have always had a roof over my head, and I have never met someone who does not have one, this is what I consider and believe to be “normal”. However in my opinion, everyone has a different version of what is “normal”. This is because I believe that everyone lives a different life and has different occurrences within it, to cause their own version of normality. So who am I to say that something is not normal? When in reality, it could be normal to other people; it is just not normal to me.
Something that stood out to me was when the article said,
While these women were without houses, they were not quiet without homes. This was because they made their home in the city as best they could (Freud, 1999, p. 442).
I found this statement to be really inspiring. This is because I recognize that the author pointed out the difference between a house and a home. To me, a house is more so the physical building that someone lives in, while a home is much different than that. To me, a home is full of warmth and love. A home is somewhere that I feel comfortable, wanted and is a place that is truly mine. These women in the article were able to make the city of London their home. Even though they were sleeping on steps of buildings and in hostesses, they were able to be comfortable there, while accepting the position of homelessness that they are in and they made the most of it. The way that the women dealt with their homelessness is inspiring to me because it seemed to me that they were dealing with it to the best of their ability.
In the article there were three women who were interviewed about their experiences with homelessness.

Jean, one of the women, mentioned that homelessness was romantic (Freud, 1999, p. 455). “For Jean, ‘homelessness’ was romantic because of the dangers, not in spite of them” (Freud, 1999, p. 455). This is another example of how the women were inspirational to me. Jean looked at homelessness in a way that I would have never looked at it. To me, because of my perceptions of homelessness and what I have seen is as, I would not consider it to be romantic. What I am used to seeing are people who have not bathed in a very long time, who are begging on the street for money, who have mental or physical disabilities, and this is not what I consider romantic. Romance to me, is getting flowers delivered to you, and getting swept off my feel by the love of my life. This is because my favorite genre of movies is romance and the movies that I have seen have shaped my perceptions of what romance should be like. That is why I think that it is incredible that Jean can see the beautiful in what I perceive to be the

ugly.
Another thing that stood out to me in this article was when Jean mentioned that people just assumed that she was a bag lady because she lived on the streets, and she explained her frustration with this. She said,
I thought that people in general they love to categorize. You belong there, you belong there. If they see that you’re on the streets they do categorize you as a bag lady. And that is dreadful for me, they want to put you in little categories. (Freud, 1999, p. 446)
What Jean is describing is her belief that people have the subconscious desire to categorize everything in life, including people. I agree with this belief completely, because whether it is conscious or subconscious, the desire to categorize everything is always there for me. I think that by doing this, I find it easier to process and understand what exactly is happening in my life and build my life around these superficial categories. These categories bring security to me, because they can either be a positive category or a negative one. For example, I am glad that I categorize myself as a student, but not a drug addict, because I believe that being a student in university is something that will better myself for the future, while I believe that being a drug addict could harm my future because I fear that it will get in the way of reaching my dream of being a social worker. I think that it is impossible to avoid categorizing everything because I believe it to be human nature, but that people do not realize what harm can come from doing this. This harm is exactly what Jean mentioned in the article. In the article the people who categorized her as a bag lady really hurt her because that is the furthest thing from the truth, however, the bystanders were just too quick to judge. Growing up, a lesson that I was taught was to “not judge a book by its cover”. By categorizing I am being too quick to judge based on the surface appearance of what I see. Although I try not to categorize consciously now because I realize that harm can be done from doing so, it is still occurring subconsciously because of the habit that it has become for me.
In conclusion, this article gave me as a reader a view of homelessness that I have never seen or experienced before. Through the insight of the women who were interviewed, I am able to realize what a strong person that it takes to be able to live the life that they are living. Being able to find a home and romance in a place that I would never begin to look for them, opened my eyes up to the way of life that I have been living, as well as the categories that I have created in my life to allow me to feel as if I have some normality in my comparison to various people and things.