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Bag Ladies
From the wards to the streets
Christine Alavi
Associate Professor, Faculty of Nursing, Griffith University, QLD
Abstract
This paper discusses the movement of inmates from mental hospitals to the community with particular focus on homeless women. It raises the question of the fate of bag ladies once the national Mental Health Policy and Plan have run their course in the middle of 1998 when 'community care' has been inadequately resourced. It explores alternative explanations for odd behaviour other than labelling such behaviour psychotic.
Keywords
mental health policy, homeless women, narrative transgressions, de-institutionalisation
Article Text
The movement of inmates from psychiatric institutions to the community has been underway in Australia since the 1950s (Australian Health Ministers, 1992), and was given fresh impetus by the publication of the Mental Health Policy and Mental Health Plan in 1992.
These documents set the parameters for 'a new community oriented approach to the provision of mental health services' (National Mental Health Policy, 1992:7), foreshadowing the need for large institutions to close and the relocation of many of their residents to other facilities such as general hospitals, group housing, hostels, and their homes.
While the initial rationales for this movement stemmed from concerns for human rights, the success of this transition was, and remains, dependent upon the adequate provision of resources to fund community mental health services. Many people fall through the gaps between institutional and community care; and health professionals tend to prefer to work with those in whom they can see improvement rather than with the homeless and disaffiliated (Alavi, 1993).
Because we have failed to define 'community' we are unable to adequately provide 'community care' that will meet the needs of those who are homeless and disaffiliated. Women, who tend to use mental health services more than men (Cowan, 1996), and who are more vulnerable to 'external socio-political factors [that] have consequences for an individual's self-esteem and for the possibility, or not, of negotiating for self in social systems of structured power inequalities' (Horsfall, 1997), are increasingly likely to become dispossessed.
Bags for the bag lady are literally filled with meaning; the emptier she feels, the more she has to fill them up. Filling bags and carrying them everywhere in shopping trolleys or carts is a metaphor for keeping herself together. Bag ladies do, of course, have to carry all their possessions with them because they have only the often dangerous, alternative of shelters or hostels if they are not to stay on the streets. They do, however, resemble women who have been institutionalised in mental hospitals in the way they collect and hoard possessions.
In mental hospitals, which have now been transposed to the streets of major cities (Alavi, 1994), women had no defined space for themselves or their personal effects such as photographs, which are an extension of themselves and the life they used to inhabit. They would take as much as they could from foraging in bathrooms or other areas of the ward. Such articles as they might appropriate included small folded pieces of toilet paper, or bits of foil stuffed into handbags or pushed down knickers or stockings, tablets of soap, or underwear taken from washing lines, or from the hospital store and worn layer upon layer.
It would be easy to see such an amassing of goods as a symptom of some psychosis, and indeed, that is how such behavior is often portrayed. Alternative explanations could suggest a need to own something when the woman is denuded of any possessions; a desire to re-create a home or some space where she has some substance; an expression of a desire to say that she is important rather than someone of no consequence.
Like these former inmates, bag ladies are devoid of a space that belongs to them. There is always the possibility that they will be moved on from places where they have attempted to create a home-in a cardboard box, in a lavatory, under a bridge, or in a railway station. Bags become a way of creating a barrier around themselves, a way of carving out some area which they can inhabit safely and exclusively.
It is not uncommon to see homeless women surrounded by mounds of black garbage bags. The heavy-duty garbage bag has come to replace, in many instances, the more varied array of bags that once was the feature of bag ladies. The black garbage bag is a much more ambiguous container: it is a garbage bag, as well as a bag for holding treasured possessions; it is opaque so that its contents cannot be seen or known, much as the layered woman can no longer be seen or known; it will hold copious amounts of material of different sizes or shapes; and it can be maneuvered into different spaces, or piled into a shopping trolley to construct a barrier to hide behind.
Bag ladies wear many layers of clothing, and although an obvious function of these is for easy transport of a wardrobe which might otherwise be stolen and, in the winter to keep the wearer warm, there are other explanations for the many and varied layers. Bag ladies themselves will explain that many layers of protection are a barrier not only to the cold, but to prevent or discourage sexual attack, and some thick coats with bulky under layers act as a disincentive to muggings or physical abuse. The clothes can act, often, as a disguise and can be a manifestation of another persona:
Leah looked fierce ... because of her clothing which gave her an aura of archaic power that I associated with biblical epics. She wore more layers than one could imagine ... All the edges were tattered, giving her a mediaeval look enhanced by her leggings, which were of heavy woolen cloth wrapped around with string at the bottom ... Around her head were wrapped rags, pieced together with large knots ... She wore three pairs of glasses all bound together very solidly with wire at the bridges and temples. Half of the outermost pair had broken off though so she had three lenses in front of one eye and two in front of the other.(Golden, 1992:205-6).
Stephanie Golden in The Women Outside, written out of her experiences of working at the Dwelling Place in New York, and who provides this description of Leah, goes on to suggest that such choice of clothing could mimic the dress of the mediaeval fool-one who comes to stand for the foibles and unacceptable parts of ruler or king and who, by dressing and behaving strangely, might be able to utter truths that might otherwise be unspeakable.
Leah's patchwork garments might also provide her with a way of proclaiming her condition, and could signify that she herself feels fragmented and layered; made up of different scraps of life which need to be held together firmly with string, rope, and wire because the cement of 'normality' has been eroded. Her mode of dress might be another way of hoarding, or collecting around herself a meaningful world.
Another explanation for dressing bizarrely could be that bag ladies experience themselves as, and indeed, are powerless, unacknowledged and unseen. While they might choose this on one level, so that they remain safe and unmolested, their oddness equates them with the women who were formerly seen as witches: women who were outside of, and distinctive from, society, which punished them for their difference by incarceration or death.
Being positioned as other, as witchlike or transgressive, causes some bag women to speak of being controlled by the devil or of being under influence of evil forces (Golden, 1992). They might express an internalisation of this by displaying a deep self-hatred, and they might proclaim their wickedness loudly either directly or in code. Other women, with their ascribed wickedness as a sub-text, protest their goodness by purporting to be the Pope, or to be persons of great virtue. Golden (1996:206) goes on to describe a woman who called herself '"Lorelei Scherezade Marie" attributing to herself the full range of female sexuality; destructive siren, soul queen seducing the king, and a sexual virgin wedded only to spirit'. Such protestations can be seen as delusions-symptoms of madness-or can be read more positively as metaphors-a way for women to create realities for themselves when they feel robbed of agency.
Such women might see themselves as being punished for some impugned lack in a culture that does not take their experience into account; or they might be acknowledging that their learned ways of living are no longer useful and indeed have become maladaptive. They might thus resort to trying to make sense of their predicament to themselves, much as those recently admitted against their will to mental hospitals try to make sense of what has happened to them by adapting to their assigned role. While it is true that many bag ladies have been formerly inmates of psychiatric institutions, this is only one category of such women. Ellen Baxter (1981) and Lisa Ferrill (1991) have shown that the routes to homelessness are many. Precipitating events include losing a job; eviction (or rent increases) as the gentrification of inner cities reduces the amount of available low-cost housing; failure of aftercare provision for those who have been institutionalised; and withdrawal of familial supports. Women who have been abandoned or abused, divorced or widowed, or have been disowned by parents or children have often nothing to fall back on. Some, with family or friends who are willing to take them in, are reluctant to be a burden.
Inge Broverman's work on sex roles in the 1970s examined the ways in which women came to be defined as 'mentally healthy' or as 'mentally ill'. Broverman showed that mental health professionals defined 'mentally healthy women' differently from 'mentally healthy adults'. 'Mentally healthy women' were defined by characteristics such as being less aggressive, less independent, easily influenced, more passive, less logical, and less able to make decisions than the 'mentally healthy adult', who was seen to have characteristics of independence, logic and lack of emotionality-characteristics which were found to correlate more closely to those of 'mentally healthy men'. In other words, in order to be seen as normal by practicing health professional, women must be unhealthy adults.
Women who are rewarded for behaving in a passive and dependent way in relation to men might find once that relationship ends that dependence and passivity have become pathological ways of negotiating their day-to-day existence. For some women, this way of relating dependently leads them into unsuccessfully negotiating ways of living alone. If they fall through safety nets and end up on the streets, those 'mentally healthy' ways of being for women mean that they lack the resources to support themselves either financially or psychologically. As Ettie, a character in Drusilla Modjeska's (1994) novel The Orchard says:
The truth you are all resisting, is that some women do not survive. They never lift themselves out of their submission.
Mary Douglas (1970) writes about how marginality and the disorder that it implies and produces are seen to be both dangerous and powerful. Persons who are in a marginal state are placeless and thus their status within a society is indefinable. Such marginal or transitional states create dangers for others; and because the marginal person takes no responsibility for their marginality, the onus is on others to take precautions against them by avoiding, excluding or expelling them. Both danger and power come from anti-social behaviour which, Douglas argues, is the proper transgressive expression of the marginal condition. Bag ladies and mad women are at the margin. They operate for us projections and displacements of our own disorder. They exert a fascination as well as a desire to look away. When such women become placeless it is easy to ascribe antisocial or pathological attitudes and behaviour to them and thus to transfer our guilt and deny that they are women such as we are. We see them as deviants, as disordered, and this ascribe to them the status of witches, animals, lunatics or women with supernatural power.
Bag ladies are not members of any household. Homeless women are outside the family-are not fulfilling women's safe traditional roles, not conforming to social norms-and they can therefore be categorised as deviant or uncanny. Such categorisation usually includes attaching the label of mad or bad.
Fred (1956) in The Uncanny suggests the unheimlich is nothing else than a hidden familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it in a disguised form. He defines the unheimlich in two ways: firstly, as being unhomely-not being a member of the household; and secondly, as something which ought to have remained heimlich (secret) but which comes to light. Bag ladies are the repressed made manifest, the return of the unhomely; the domesticated, familiar 'mentally healthy' woman has disappeared and what replaces her is a caricature.
There is a problem, though, in romanticising such women-in seeing them as noble travelers, as women who have chosen to abandon ties to home, family and society. While this might be true in a small number of cases, the majority of women in this condition are poor, mad, or unable to successfully negotiate ways of being in society.
How then to represent their situation, to speak on their behalf? And ought we, indeed, to do this? Dick Hebdidge (1993:178) in his essay 'Redeeming Witness' uses Martha Rosler's 'Fragments of a Metropolitan Viewpoint' in order to raise this question:
'Concerned' or, as Martha Rosler calls it 'victim' photography overlooks the constitutive role of its own activity, which is held to be merely representative ... Despite his, or her benevolence in representing those who have been denied access to the means of representation, the photographer inevitably functions as an agent of the system of power that silenced these people in the first place. Thus, they are twice victimized: first by society, and then by the photographer who presumes the right to speak on their behalf. In fact, in such photography it is the photographer rather than the 'subject' who poses as the subject's consciousness, indeed conscience itself.
Linda Alcoff (1991-2) also raises the question of representation in terms of enunciative modalities: the relation between social position and the semantics of utterance. She argues that in many cases 'the practice of privileged persons speaking for or on behalf of less privileged persons has actually resulted in increasing or reinforcing the oppression of the group spoken for' (p. 7). Further, she argues, one is placed in a double bind if one does not speak since a refusal to speak on behalf of the oppressed assumes they are in a position to act as fully empowered subjects.
As John Frow (1995) points out, Alcoff's argument here closely follows Gayatri Spival (1988) in 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', where she takes issue with Foucault and Deleuze's influential remarks on the 'fundamental ... indignity of speaking for others'. Frow argues that any invocation of the oppressed as self-representing and 'fully in control of the knowledge of their oppression' (p. 274) serves to effect a double concealment: on the one hand, of the fact that these self-representing oppressed are still (since they are invoked to play a role) a fact of discourse, a representation; and, on the other, of the role of intellectuals in constructing this self-negating representation, their representation of themselves as transparent.
Such arguments allude to the fact that being poor or dispossessed is sometimes constructed as a state of being which is chosen rather than imposed. The ways in which we can speak or write about dispossessed and homeless women are important. We must consider what responses we, as health professionals, and as feminists will make to such women as we move towards the end of the century when the Mental Health Policy and Plan have run their course, and insufficient resources have been made available to community mental health services, and when the numbers of bag ladies increase on the streets of our major cities, and in our emergency departments.
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