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In nineteenth-century America, the bourgeois home epitomized family, morality, and virtue. But this era also witnessed massive urban growth and the acceptance of the market as the overarching model for economic relations. A rapidly changing environment bred the antithesis of "home": the urban boardinghouse. In this groundbreaking study, Wendy Gamber explores the experiences of the numerous people—old and young, married and single, rich and poor—who made boardinghouses their homes. Gamber contends that the very existence of the boardinghouse helped create the domestic ideal of the single family home. Where the home was private, the boardinghouse theoretically was public. If homes nurtured virtue, boardinghouses supposedly bred vice. Focusing on the larger cultural meanings and the commonplace realities of women’s work, she examines how the houses were run, the landladies who operated them, and the day-to-day considerations of food, cleanliness, and petty crime. From ravenous bedbugs to penny-pinching landladies, from disreputable housemates to "boarder's beef," Gamber illuminates the annoyances—and the satisfactions—of nineteenth-century boarding life.
In this innovative and insightful book, Elizabeth Engelhardt argues that modern American food, business, caretaking, politics, sex, travel, writing, and restaurants all owe a debt to boardinghouse women in the South. From the eighteenth century well into the twentieth, entrepreneurial women ran boardinghouses throughout the South; some also carried the institution to far-flung places like California, New York, and London. Owned and operated by Black, Jewish, Native American, and white women, rich and poor, immigrant and native-born, these lodgings were often hubs of business innovation and engines of financial independence for their owners. Within their walls, boardinghouse residents and owners developed the region’s earliest printed cookbooks, created space for making music and writing literary works, formed ad hoc communities of support, tested boundaries of race and sexuality, and more. Engelhardt draws on a vast archive to recover boardinghouse women’s stories, revealing what happened in the kitchens, bedrooms, hallways, back stairs, and front porches as well as behind closed doors—legacies still with us today.
Introduction : Houses and homes -- Away from home -- Keeping house -- "The most cruel and thankless way a woman can earn her living" -- Boarders' beefs -- Nests of crime and dens of vice -- "Will they board, or keep house?" -- Charity begins at home -- Epilogue : "Decay of the boarding-house.
Living with Strangers examines the history and cultural representation of bed-sitting rooms and boarding houses in England from the early twentieth century to the present. Providing a historical overview, the authors explore how these alternative domestic spaces came to provide shelter for a diverse demographic of working women and men, retired army officers, gay people, students, bohemians, writers, artists, performers, migrants and asylum seekers, as well as shady figures and criminals. Drawing on historical records, case studies, and examples from literature, art, and film, the book examines how the prevalence and significance of bedsits and boarding houses in novels, plays, detective sto...
A collection of articles illustrating the diversity of origins of the American people.
Combining documentary evidence, oral and architectural history, and environmental and material culture studies, they trace the deterioration of living conditions for mill workers and their families as owners began substituting native-born employees with immigrant laborers.