Hope Springs Maternal: Homeless Mothers Talk About Making Sense of Adversity (review)

Jill Gerson's revised dissertation adds the voices of homeless mothers to a literature that is dominated by social scientific studies. The qualitative research, based on twenty-four interviews of homeless mothers in New York City's shelters, provides a counterbalance to the quantitative emphasis found on the subject while it offers policymakers new solutions based on narrators' experiences.

Gerson argues that these single mothers used shelters as a "safe haven" from a complex of problems with housing, support, and relationships. A change in family status, such as becoming pregnant or giving birth to a child, led mothers into shelters where they could keep their children safe while they recovered and regrouped. The author uses the introduction to clarify terms used in the study and to offer specific data on New York City's homeless population. The subsequent chapters draw from the interviews with lengthy excerpts that describe the mothers' reflections on their collective past, present, and future as well as their hopes for themselves and their children.

Approaching the issue from the field of social work, Gerson describes four factors that she believes contribute to the problem of homelessness for poor mothers. The external and structural factors include a reduction in the supply of subsidized housing due to the cuts in federal funding since Reagan-era policies. In addition, job opportunities for male partners declined because of macroeconomic trends in globalization and deindustrialization. At the level of personal factors, Gerson found that weak social networks led to fewer alternative economic resources that would otherwise offer a buffer against homelessness. Finally, life course factors, by which she meant a series of bad luck and bad choices, contributed to the mothers' homelessness. At the time of her study, single mothers were the major group using transitional housing. Gerson found that they had experienced their own significant disruption in childhood, such as abuse, being a runaway, or living in foster care. Furthermore, those with abuse in their childhood had a high correlation with being homeless as a young adult. The interviews guided Gerson to two interventions that would lead to better outcomes for homeless mothers who use shelters. She recommends a reorganization of the delivery of services into a coherent system and the use of narrative practice that would offer homeless mothers a process for solving personal issues.

The use of narrative practice, Gerson's second intervention, is the area through which she interacts with oral narrative methods. The two dozen narratives that she conducted had therapeutic outcomes for the narrators. Self-reflection and self-efficacy may result from recounting one's life story. Even for this group of very young narrators (most were in their twenties), talking about their lives provided the subjects with an opportunity to separate their past of largely negative experiences with a future under their direction. Specifically, homeless mothers could learn to externalize their problems and explore ways to solve them. Her narrators reported that being listened to was an infrequent experience for them and offered some perspective on the fragments of their lives. To her credit, Gerson recognized that her interviews took place with volunteers, not a random sample, and thus could be biased toward those with a greater outlook for the future. Yet oral historians will find her suggestion of interviews as therapy quite distinct from the methods and theory of oral history.

For scholars of U.S. social welfare, the narratives of women in this volume are compelling and heart wrenching. Few publications offer the voices and experiences of this group. However, as either a social scientist or an oral historian, the absence of any discussion on the research methodology proved troubling. Readers do not learn in any detail how the author found the narrators. One learns that the research took place over a period often years, during which she conducted the twenty-four interviews, yet she provides no information on the individual interviews (their length, process...