Drawing on visions of the future of young women in poverty: Art as a feminist research method

The statistics in the US on single impoverished women’s employment show that firstly, over eighty percent of those living in poverty are women and only a third of these find adequately paid and protected jobs by their late twenties. Lack of real chance to ‘self-actualise’ through employment as compared to middle-class women raises the question of if and how impoverished young women do define success, or future dreams, or self-actualisation for themselves This chapter provides a better understanding of the women’s own definitions and visions of self-fulfilment, as a base for creating contextualised visions of success that are not fantasies that perpetuate their sense of failure, but rather expressions of success or self-fulfilment as defined from within a specific social context - and as a way to change that context. The interviewee asked them to first draw and then to explain their goals and visions of the future.