Women And Housing

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This collection explores the housing circumstances of women in developed and emerging societies in Europe, USA and East Asia, at a time of substantial economic and social change. Its focus is on the interface between housing and gender and how this socially constructed relationship manifests and transforms over time and space.

Black women have traditionally represented the canvas on which many debates about poverty and welfare have been drawn. For a quarter century after the publication of the notorious Moynihan report, poor black women were tarred with the same brush: "ghetto moms" or "welfare queens" living off the state, with little ambition or hope of an independent future. At the same time, the history of the civil rights movement has all too often succumbed to an idolatry that stresses the centrality of prominent leaders while overlooking those who fought daily for their survival in an often hostile urban landscape. In this collective biography, Rhonda Y. Williams takes us behind, and beyond, politically expedient labels to provide an incisive and intimate portrait of poor black women in urban America. Drawing on dozens of interviews, Williams challenges the notion that low-income housing was a resounding failure that doomed three consecutive generations of post-war Americans to entrenched poverty. Instead, she recovers a history of grass-roots activism, of political awakening, and of class mobility, all facilitated by the creation of affordable public housing. The stereotyping of black women, especially mothers, has obscured a complicated and nuanced reality too often warped by the political agendas of both the left and the right, and has prevented an accurate understanding of the successes and failures of government anti-poverty policy. At long last giving human form to a community of women who have too often been treated as faceless pawns in policy debates, Rhonda Y. Williams offers an unusually balanced and personal account of the urban war on poverty from the perspective of those who fought, and lived, it daily.

First published in 1997, this volume recognises the issue of gender inequality in Hong Kong housing. The invisibility of the housing problem is compounded by the dominant patriarchal Chinese culture in Hong Kong. The issue remains marginal in Western countries as well, despite increasing concern. Kam Wah Chan makes meaningful, insightful progress on the housing issue in Hong Kong by focusing on the crucial issues of housing for lone mothers and for women in new towns.

First published in 1997, this volume recognises the issue of gender inequality in Hong Kong housing. The invisibility of the housing problem is compounded by the dominant patriarchal Chinese culture in Hong Kong. The issue remains marginal in Western countries as well, despite increasing concern. Kam Wah Chan makes meaningful, insightful progress on the housing issue in Hong Kong by focusing on the crucial issues of housing for lone mothers and for women in new towns.

Home and care are central aspects of everyday, personal lives, yet they are also shaped by political and economic change. Within a context of austerity, economic restructuring, worsening inequality and resource rationing, policy around and experience of these key areas is shifting. Taking an interdisciplinary and feminist perspective, this book illustrates how economic and political changes affect everyday lives for many families and households in the UK. Setting out both new empirical material and new conceptual terrain, the authors draw on approaches from human geography, social policy, feminist and political theory to explore issues of home and care in times of crisis.

The purpose of this study is to examine how, and to what extent gender may have a negative impact on the realizationof women's right to adequate housing and to discuss ways and means to level this barrier. The right to housing is approached in a holistic manner, and the indivisibility, interdependence and interrelatedness of all human rights is stressed.