- K
- Posted February 4, 2009
PRINT COPIES OF THE REPORT ARE NOW AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE IN ROOM 200 CAROLINE RICHARDSON HALL DURING NCCROW BUSINESS HOURS. EACH COPY IS $10. CASH OR CHECKS ONLY, PLEASE.
Katrina and the Women of New Orleans
is a collaborative effort of the Gender and Disasters Research Group
sponsored by the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women. The
goal in writing this report was to analyze the ways the hurricanes of
2005 affected the lives of women and girls and to bring those findings
to the attention of policy makers, community leaders, scholars, grant
makers, and disaster managers.
The ten chapters of the report
focus on the pre-storm vulnerability and post-storm resilience of New
Orleans women, and tackle the dearth of qualitative data specific to
women to report on housing, employment and earnings, women’s physical
and mental health, and domestic violence.
The report is available for download and redistribution as a single PDF, and as PDFs of individual chapters.
Some rights reserved. Please contact nccrow@tulane.edu or phone 504 865 5238 for permissions.
DOWNLOAD THE REPORT =>
http://newcomb.tulane.edu/article/report-katrina-and-the-women-of-new-orleans?department_id=nccrow-research
A complex picture and simple message emerges from our findings: If
New Orleans is to successfully rebuild its status as a great American
city, it must focus on the welfare of women. Women are the
majority of the New Orleans population. Women raise children, tend to
the ill and aged, manage households, and comprise 50 percent of the New
Orleans labor force working in sales, service, management and
professional occupations. Women are essential to the home and in the
workforce. Three-fourths of mothers with children work outside the
home. Not surprising, women have been more likely than men to suffer
post-traumatic stress and other anxiety disorders following Hurricane
Katrina. Moreover, huge discrepancies exist in the distribution of
rewards, a fact made worse by the storm. Women earn just 71 percent of
the wages paid to men, 10 percent less than pre-Katrina. More than
one-third of families are headed by a women, but a great many of these
are in poverty. Women’s lower wages mean more women are in need of
low-income housing, affordable childcare, and free healthcare --
resources made particularly scarce by the storm. "Woman" is not a
coherent or homogeneous grouping and Hurricane Katrina served to
perpetuate differences among women. Black women earn just 61 percent of
the wages paid to White women. While 55 percent of White women hold a
Bachelor's degree or higher, only 14 percent of Black women do, an
unacceptable reality in a city that boasts seven four year colleges and
universities and several technical colleges. Sadly, what remained
unchanged by Hurricane Katrina were long standing traditions regarding
the roles of women and men, and the historical divisions among women
based on race and class.
Contributors to Katrina and the Women of New Orleans: Berre Burch and Stacy Overstreet, Department of
Psychology at Tulane University; Meghan Greeley and Planned Parenthood
of Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta; Pam Jenkins, Department of
Sociology at the University of New Orleans, and Betty Phillips, Fire
and Emergency Management Program at Oklahoma State University; Shirley
Laska, the Center for Hazards Assessment, Response and Technology and
the Department of Sociology at the University of New Orleans, and Betty
Hearn Morrow, Department of Sociology at Florida International
University, emerita; Rachel E. Luft, Department of Sociology at the
University of New Orleans, with Shana Griffin of INCITE! Women of Color
against Violence; and Charlotte D’Ooge, Nancy Mock, and Beth Willinger
of the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women at Tulane
University.
