SYNOPSIS

Women of Slender Means tells the stories of five of the 300 women living at the YWCA Brooklyn. We meet Frances, a WWII veteran who arrived during the Great Migration, hoping to escape segregation; Ann, an activist who worked at the infamous Willowbrook School, and is a witness to gentrification; Mary, raised by nuns in an orphanage twice burned to the ground by the Ku Klux Klan; Cheryl, a Native American 82nd Airborne veteran who suffers from PTSD;  and Wendy, born into privilege and a survivor of violent abuse. Their stories, told with grace and humor, reveal multidimensional lives of women often ignored by the media: women of color, women living alone, women of slender means.