Of Women, Knights and Horses

Millions of "displaced homemakers " are starting to organize

The motto on Milo Smith's office wall reads: "She who waits for the knight in shining armor must clean up after his horse." Widowed nine years ago at 47, she went back to college "to get another piece of paper." At 50, she was told she was unemployable. "They said I should go to the welfare office, that my new degree was worthless because of lack of recent work experience."

Furious, she turned her life experience into a career. Now she is director of the 2 1/2-year-old Displaced Homemakers Center in Oakland, Calif. It is one of the two original centers (the other is in Baltimore) that serve as models for more than 50 programs that have sprung up across the country in the past two years.

The term displaced homemaker was invented by another Californian, Tish Sommers, 64, who was divorced at 57 and "discovered I was part of an invisible problem, one of the women who had fallen through the cracks, too young for social security, too old to be hired, not eligible for unemployment insurance because homemaking is not considered work." Also ineligible for welfare because she was not disabled and had no children under 18, caught in the double bind of age and sex discrimination, she saw that she belonged to both the middle class and the economically handicapped. With Laurie Shields, 58, a widow ("someone who always thought of myself as Mrs. Arthur Shields"), Sommers organized the Alliance for Displaced Homemakers in 1975 and traveled around the country to focus interest on the problem.

Sommers estimates that there are at least 3 million displaced homemakers, though nobody knows for sure. For practical purposes, a displaced homemaker is a person from 35 to 64, overwhelmingly likely to be a woman, who has been caring for family members and has lost the means of support through divorce, separation, death or some other calamity like the disabling of a spouse. She either has not held a job for a long time or has never worked outside the home.

"People don't understand why so many women find themselves in this desperate plight," says Cynthia Marano, 31, director of the Baltimore center and coordinator of the alliance's newly formed successor, the Displaced Homemakers Network. She blames the whole spectrum of social change--ever-rising divorce rates, unemployment, inflation, longer life spans, stubborn sexism and ageism. One important new factor, she adds, is the no-fault divorce laws that have been adopted by 47 states. "They are basically beneficial to younger women, but leave older women without bargaining leverage and without enough to live on." All these elements combine, she says, to produce "a large poverty group that was not with us for the long term before."

"It doesn't matter where women start out," says Charlotte Stewart, 49, coordinator of the Dallas-area centers. "After a divorce, they all end up in the same place. Down." Studies and statistics bear her out. The University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research found that after divorce "the economic status of former husbands improves, while that of former wives deteriorates." Only 2% of all divorced women with children receive more than $5,000 a year in support. Only 14% of divorce settlements include any alimony, and only 44% award child support--but less than half of either is paid regularly. Noting that working women earn on the average only 57% of men's wages, Tish Sommers says: "When you are a woman on your own, you are poor."

In earlier times, divorcees retired into disgrace, widows into genteel poverty. Today's displaced homemakers organized --starting centers, persuading 19 states to pass helping legislation. In the coming year, the Department of Labor will provide $5 million to assist displaced-home-maker programs.

"This is a generation of women on whom the rules have been changed," says Stewart. "When they find that the things they have treasured all their lives, helping their husbands achieve and raising children, are considered worthless, they suffer a terrible identity crisis." The first step toward economic self-sufficiency is to rebuild devastated selfesteem. "We have to sell the woman both to herself and to the community," says Sommers.

For self-confidence, the centers offer psychological support. The small staffs, usually women who have been through the experience themselves ("Real experts, not book experts," says Laurie Shields), have developed individualized programs that use many of the techniques of crisis intervention, assertiveness training, consciousness raising. In Grand Island, Neb., for example, Evelyn Spiehs, 49, widowed last spring, attends a weekly rap session with six other women, goes to larger career-guidance workshops and receives legal counseling. "It felt good to know they understood," she says, "and didn't just feel sorry for me. I wouldn't have been able to face anything yet without them."

The ultimate goal is a good job. While helping women to master such basics as writing a resume and surviving a job interview, the centers also work on finding openings and persuading employers to take a chance on older women. In boom areas like Texas, that may be enough. But in Baltimore, where there are not enough jobs, Cynthia Marano says, "We have learned to focus on creating jobs." Example: the Baltimore center helped clients start eight cleaning businesses.

Another solution is to encourage women to train for jobs traditionally held by men. In Waukesha County, Wis., the Women's Development Center takes women into the County Technical Institute's welding, electronics, and machine-tool shops and introduces them to women already working in such areas. Says Director Ruth Fossedal: "Money talks. The minute they find out they can earn more in those jobs they are interested."

In theory, displaced homemakers are only temporary victims of change. But an American woman now has a fifty-fifty chance of being divorced, widowed or single by the time she reaches middle age, and as Milo Smith's motto indicates, she is likely to need a horse of her own.

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