Chapter 4 WOMEN WITH "SEX-PLUS" the woman alone with the child or children - Edith Witt, San Francisco Hearing, March 7, 1975 The previous chapters have examined the pathology of sex bias in the housing market as it affects women as a class. It runs deep in our nation's history; nourished by myths, long since forsaken by reality. No woman, we have seen, is beyond its potential reach. It cuts across class, age, race or geographic lines. And since 42 percent of all married women work outside the home, even the white, maleheaded family feels its pinch in lenders' disparate treatment of the working wife's income. For many women, however, sexism is but an extra barrier they are required to surmount in their search for shelter. Trapped in the backwash of urbanization, women living in the nation's inner cities face sexism's allies ethnic, class and even age biases a virtually impregnable wall to equal housing opportunity. race, which interlock in A non-white woman in America often faces the doublebarrelled bias of sex and race; she carries the "dual burden of Jim Crow and Jane Crow". [1] Race and ethnic discrimination requires little elaboration for those familiar with this country's urban housing patterns. [2] Latins and blacks have historically been concen ETHNIC AND RACIAL DISCRIMINATION; THE MINORITY WOMAN trated in urban housing ghettoes and there is little indication that the incidence of ghettoization is waning. [3] In a July, 1974, report, the U. S. Commission on Civil More than a decade ago, this Commission noted the development of a 'white noose' of new suburban housing on the peripheries of decaying cities with an 'ever-increasing concentration of non-whites in racial ghettoes'. Today that pattern is even more pronounced. ... Racial discrimination in housing compels blacks and other minority group members to live in the metropolitan area's least desirable housing. Their housing tends to be older, in worse condition, and in less desirable neighborhoods ... [I]n various suburban communities whites harbor stereotypes which cause considerable fear of and animosity toward blacks, Mexican-Americans, and Puerto Ricans, especially those perceived as being of a lower class. [4] St. Louis, in our study, illustrated the demographic consequences of apartheid, American style. A population analyst from St. Louis University, Frank Avesing, described the situation for the Panel: The significant factor in regard to the City of St. Louis [5] In fact, the black population of St. Louis county in 1970 was 4.1 percent and of St. Louis City 43.7 percent. This polarization has not been accidental or inevitable. Powerful institutional factors in the housing market prevented non-whites, the U. S. Civil Rights Commission found, from having a free choice of housing. At hearings conducted by the Commission in 1971, a black school teacher testified how she visited more than a score of real estate offices to find out where they would offer her housing. She was invariably "steered" to an all-black or changing neighborhood. [6] a witness from the Puerto Rican community told the New York Panel, "is the primary means of getting a habitable and decent home for the East Harlem families with a female head of household." [7] Elizabeth Bruenn, a community organizer of social selfhelp for the Chinese elderly, described the plight of the Chinese woman confronting both ethnic bias and sexism in San Francisco. [8] In that same city, another witness told the Panel: Some of the people said that they felt black women had more acceptable. In Atlanta, a black female, professional state government employee, who described her inability to rent in a major complex although she felt she had all the qualifications, felt that both sex and race were factors in her exclusion. And automatically, you know, we thought it was because of race, which I'm sure it was a bit ... It's really kind of hard to say. [It was] blatant racism at first; and after really looking, I suppose it could be prejudice based on race as well as [Q. Do you see the problem of discrimination against women, particularly in housing, being aggravated by your also being black?] ... Definitely. [10] sex Ms. Frankie Freeman, a Commissioner on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, concluded that "the conditions [poor inner city housing where minority families predominate] which have been described, reveal a situation that is the result of the discrimination against women, which is compounded by the discrimination on the basis of race, or vice versa, as the case may be". [11] As Alice Cumba told the New York Panel: We are not claiming that only Puerto Rican women are subject [12] apply to all women, but we see the effect of discrimination In 1975 poverty amid plenty remains an American paradox. While the size and composition of the Nation's poor may CLASS DISCRIMINATION: HOUSEHOLD change, there are no encouraging Government housing programs, while helping many families since their inception forty years ago, have fallen far shy of providing a decent home for every American. Indeed in recent years, Federal housing efforts have largely been shelved, with class bias contributing heavily to their demise. Carl Stokes, the former Mayor of Cleveland, has described the "great and fearsome" resistance he encountered in both white and black communities when he sought to put low-income housing in a middle-income neighborhood. [14] Suburbia's use of zoning, the referendum, and other controls to fence out the poor and real and fanciful problems associated with them is by now common knowledge. [15] - Many then would agree with the witness at the New York ... the most serious sex discrimination in housing results from the lack of adequate low-income housing. For one group of low-income women - [16] the female-headed household the problem is worsening. The President's Commission on Income Maintenance Programs, after examining "mobility among the poor," concluded: The 64 percent remaining in poverty were disproportionately comprised of nonwhites, female-headed families ... For [this] group, poverty is not a way station, it is a dead end. [17] According to the Women's Bureau in the U.S.Department of Labor, Of the 6,191,000 families headed by women in March 1972, 2,100,000 or 34 percent, had incomes below the low-income level in 1971. The comparable proportion for families with a male-head was 7 percent. [18] If you add additional "disabilities", in 1971 you found that among those female-headed families where there are related children under 18, 45 percent were poor; that 61 percent of the persons in families that 60 percent of persons in black female- Virtually, the entire decline in the overall number of persons in poverty between 1960 and 1972 is accounted for by persons in male-headed families. During this period poor persons in female-headed households increased by 867,000. As a result, while only 24 percent of the poor families were female-headed in 1960, by 1972, 43 percent were female-headed. And if you focus on families with children, more than 50 percent of poor families with children are female-headed. [20] About two-thirds of these households live in central cities and more than 24 percent are in overcrowded quarters, with the incidence of overcrowding about three times the national level. Fifteen percent lack complete plumbing twice the national level of 5.9 percent. [21] more than In the cities we examined, the housing plight of the femaleheaded household with children was, for each income group, discouraging. If the household was poor it was impossible. San Antonio, in this respect, was typical of the other cities. There the Panel was told that out of the 175,000 residents living in units unsuitable for rehabilitation, 50 percent of these are female-headed. For low-income mothers, child care facilities are crucial if they are to work. They are almost never avialable, and when they are, they are often "used as a tool of a welfare system which has attempted to tie the granting of financial aid to the mothers working outside the home". [22] In their study, Planning, Woman and Change, Karen Hapgood and Judith Getzels concluded: Even with income to spare, quality daytime child care assistance is often difficult to locate and is complicated further by lack of public transportation. Day care is a service which should require no justification; day care must be normalized. As Margaret Steinfels says in Who's Minding the Children?: "It should be available to working-class and middle-class mothers |