Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America was published by Crown Publishers in 1988, based on months Kozol spent in the Martinique Hotel — a former welfare hotel in midtown Manhattan where the city housed homeless families at enormous public expense in conditions of appalling squalor.
The title comes from Jeremiah 31:15 (“Rachel weeping for her children”), and the book’s method is to present the people living in these conditions as fully human — not as statistics, not as social problems, but as individuals with histories, intelligence, and dignity. Kozol introduces us to mothers struggling to keep their children in school, to fathers who lost jobs and then apartments, to children growing up in rooms with rats and no kitchen, to elderly people abandoned by the systems that were supposed to protect them.
The systemic analysis is precise: Kozol traces how housing policy (the destruction of SRO hotels, the defunding of public housing, the gentrification of affordable neighborhoods), welfare policy (regulations designed to humiliate rather than support), and healthcare policy (no treatment for mental illness or addiction) combine to create a funnel that pushes families onto the street and then into shelters that cost more than apartments would.
The book was instrumental in shifting public discourse about homelessness from blaming individuals (laziness, addiction, mental illness) to examining systems — though the policy changes it advocated have largely not been achieved.
Collecting Rachel and Her Children
First edition (Crown Publishers, New York, 1988): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $10–$25
- Signed first edition: $25–$60