Naked Capitalism

He really doesn’t have a clue.

They’re as punitive and pitiless as the old style ones. In my late fifties, with no prospect of reemployment, I recently had my first experiences with two of these. I’ve worked all my life and been my only support all my life. It was my preference to do this, rather than derive any part of my upkeep from the wages of the person I slept with. My “crime” was doing this while female. Since sex discrimination has become legal again, I was forced out of a profession that’s been redefined as historically male, and have not been hired for female entry level positions due to my age and “overqualified” background. I did everything I could, including backpacking into legal sites in the state parks in the mountains here, to keep from going into a shelter, but in the end could not even afford the gas to drive the fifteen or so miles round trip to the park from where any prospect of work existed. (“Obamaville” tent villages are not possible the way Hoovervilles were – the times are so much more pitiless that almost every city has ordinances against such places, and where they’re allowed, they’re controlled to the point of being worse than the shelters. The infamous “tent in the woods” near any urban area is out of the question for a woman unless she attaches herself to a homeless male for protection). The shelter itself was physically considered to be one of the best in the state. It administers most of the charitable and many of the government resources for five counties. It is new, the fixtures are more than adequate and the meals are very good. A major problem was precisely the punitive “poor house” attitude: the Calvinistic view the women who administered the shelter had towards those who needed its services (and those women’s freedom to spend their time this way depended on the high wages of the men -they- slept with). Residents must line up to take a breathalyser test in the common area when coming in in the late afternoon, everyone must be inside the shelter by 6:00 p.m., no one is allowed out after that time without written permission, and everyone is locked out of their rooms at 8:00 a.m. on weekdays and 9:00 a.m. on weekends. Women’s rooms had four permanent beds and lockers, but usually had two more folding beds crammed into the walkway at the foot of the beds. The men’s rooms were larger but had eight residents. All the shelter’s maintenance, from cleaning to cooking (when that was not done by church or other charity groups) to grounds-keeping, was done by the residents through required “chores”. Every resident was required to “volunteer” for one or more such chores every day or be made to leave. I did not mind at all doing part of the upkeep, but did mind the indentured labor aspect of being made to do it. In addition, administering such requirements became part of the petty abuse the more vindictive of the regular staff considered one of the major perks of their job. Residents were required to work on a “plan” towards permanent housing with one of the administrators. Such “plans” necessarily required a job. These women reproduced the sexism of the larger society: in addition to there being more beds for men than for women, living conditions were kept as much as possible from interfering with any man’s job who has one. Their “plans” for men were much more realistic as well, in that the men had more of a chance of finding work, even when they had, as the majority there did, a prison record. Their “plans” for women pretty much amounted to: you screwed up by not selecting a good enough (or any) husband, any job is better than no job at all, no matter how ill paid, discriminatory or demeaning, and your stay limit without a job is 30 days. Their ranking for women was below men in services, respect and resources and within that ranking, women with children came first and women without children were at the very bottom. Uncontrolled aggression from other residents and uncontained illness were the primary factors that made living there not possible. There were decent, generous, responsible residents, but not unlike middle and high school, the lowest common denominator ruled. Due, again, to the sexist ranking of the administrators, I lost the job I had found after a great deal of effort on my part and no help at all on theirs. It was a suitably gender stereotyped job cleaning bathrooms from 5 pm until 2 to 4 am at the local university’s stadium after athletic events. Any man there who had a second or third shift job was allowed complete privacy to sleep during the day; the rule was emphasized in the obligatory “house meeting” held every evening. The administrators kept letting a woman with a baby into my dorm room for trivial reasons and allowed her to keep me awake to the point where I had less than five hours sleep in forty eight and could not work. Their justification was that women with children had priority for any reason, even though that was supposed to be only an adult women’s room. They had put a woman who had just had a miscarriage into the family room, where this woman should have gone, as “therapy” and because the other woman with children did not want to share the room with another child. They dismissed my need to sleep for my job as “just shared living” (always said with a smug little smirk by the administrator) and said I could leave if I had a problem with it. I was also attacked on other occasions by two women who were later expelled for being on illegal drugs; their initial unprovoked aggression towards me was dismissed, again with a smile, as “shared living”. Women with dangerous mental problems were also put into the regular woman’s dorm. One had kept the other women in the room terrorized before I stayed there. She also kept them up all night because she alone was allowed to sleep there during the day (due to her mental illness!), while they had to be up and out on the streets or at their jobs, as one resident was, by eight. She had been committed before for cutting up residents’ clothes with a knife; she was recommitted again just after I got there.