Diagnosing the Shopping Bag Lady: Homeless Women, Psychiatric Deinstitutionalization, and the Limits of Feminist Liberation

The figure of the “shopping bag lady”—an older woman with mental illness, living on the street, carrying bags of all her belongings—appeared regularly in popular representations of homelessness in New York City in 1970s and 1980s. One chief factor in the rise of homelessness among women with mental illness was the closure of state mental hospitals. But the realities that fueled homelessness among women with mental illness cannot explain their overrepresentation in the widespread figuration of the shopping bag lady. In this talk, Vider explores why the shopping bag lady emerged as a cultural figure in the 1970s, and how visual representations of homeless women both reflected and reshaped broader social welfare and sociological perspectives. Feminist photography and documentaries on homeless women advanced the bag lady as a broader emblem of women’s economic and social precarity and the potential dangers of feminist liberation, while at the same time pathologizing poverty as a sign and symptom of mental illness.