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No Way To Live: Poor Women Speak Out (New Star)
After interviewing over 50 poor B.C. women, Sheila Baxter believes our present welfare system encourages sickness and poverty.
"In the old days in England," says Baxter, author of No Way To Live: Poor Women Speak Out (New Star $9.95), "Poor people would deliberately disable themselves so they would have the right to beg.
"Our welfare system here is still geared to those English Poor Laws. There's no incentive to get well. If a woman struggles to be healthy, she knows her cheque is going to be cut by $50. But if you crack up, if you have emotional or alcohol problems, you get more money."
Baxter's book presents women's natural voices, unedited and unanalysed, talking about how they survive. It also contains statistics from Canadian anti-poverty groups which claim 41% of all single women in Canada live below the poverty line, 82% of the elderly poor are women and 49% of all single-parent families headed by women are poor.
"Sickness is being encouraged because it's a sin in this society to be able bodied and not employed, even when there are no jobs available. Vander Zalm and Mulroney have that ethic. That's why I had to do this book. To let women at the bottom of the system have their say."
No Way To Live serves as a companion volume to Hastings and Main (New Star $9.95), an oral documentary volume primarily concerned with poor Vancouver men, and Opening Doors: Vancouver's East End (Sound Heritage/ Milestone Publications $7.25), interviews with Strathcona area residents edited by Daphne Marlatt and Carol Itter.
[BCBW Summer 1988]
"In the old days in England," says Baxter, author of No Way To Live: Poor Women Speak Out (New Star $9.95), "Poor people would deliberately disable themselves so they would have the right to beg.
"Our welfare system here is still geared to those English Poor Laws. There's no incentive to get well. If a woman struggles to be healthy, she knows her cheque is going to be cut by $50. But if you crack up, if you have emotional or alcohol problems, you get more money."
Baxter's book presents women's natural voices, unedited and unanalysed, talking about how they survive. It also contains statistics from Canadian anti-poverty groups which claim 41% of all single women in Canada live below the poverty line, 82% of the elderly poor are women and 49% of all single-parent families headed by women are poor.
"Sickness is being encouraged because it's a sin in this society to be able bodied and not employed, even when there are no jobs available. Vander Zalm and Mulroney have that ethic. That's why I had to do this book. To let women at the bottom of the system have their say."
No Way To Live serves as a companion volume to Hastings and Main (New Star $9.95), an oral documentary volume primarily concerned with poor Vancouver men, and Opening Doors: Vancouver's East End (Sound Heritage/ Milestone Publications $7.25), interviews with Strathcona area residents edited by Daphne Marlatt and Carol Itter.
[BCBW Summer 1988]
Submitted on December 9, 2003 in By David.
