Housing and Gender: Beyond the Public/Private Dichotomy

Patricia Gardiner is a graduate student in City Planning at San Diego State University. She is Irish, and earned her undergraduate degree in History and Politics at North London Polytechnic In Britain. She has lived in the United States for six years and has worked in a variety of community development jobs, Including a period at the San Diego Housing Commission. She worked during the summer of 1988 with the Architects and Planners for Nicaragua (APSNICA), helping to develop a housing plan for the city ofOcotol. Many of the recent feminist housing analyses in the URited States (Sarkissian, 1978; Wekerle & Carter, 1978; Saegert, 1985) have focused on the public/private dichotomy as a way to understand the powerful forces behind suburbanization in the experiences of isolation and loneliness for women in the suburbs. This paper critiques the use of the public/private dichotomy as the primary tool of current feminist housing analysis, because it speaks largely to the housing conditions and experiences of white middle-class women. The shelter experiences of women of color and poor white women historically have not lain in the relative privilege of the suburbs, nor have their lives fallen into a neat public/ private dichotomy.