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  • The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America
  • Eric J. Morser
Wendy Gamber . The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. xii + 213 pp. ISBN 0-8018-8571-X, $45.00.

In this sharp and revealing book, Wendy Gamber sheds new light on a fascinating topic that historians generally overlook: the nineteenth-century American boardinghouse. Gamber begins by reminding us that although contemporary commentators celebrated privately owned homes as domestic oases in the desert of market capitalism, boardinghouses remained ubiquitous institutions that shaped the experiences of countless city inhabitants before 1900. In seven thematic chapters, she weaves a colorful tapestry of boardinghouse life. Early chapters focus on the challenges that women housekeepers faced as they tried to operate such establishments in a competitive urban environment. Women struggled to acquire houses. They labored to furnish rooms, attract lodgers, and manage complex household economies. Many also worked themselves ragged cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry for residents who rarely acknowledged their labor, let alone appreciated it. Gamber shows us that boardinghouse life was stressful in other ways for both housekeepers and their boarders. Although many lodgers, for example, genuinely enjoyed the company of their fellow residents, they often did not get enough food and sometimes struggled to identify exactly what they were eating even when ample fare was available. Naïve housekeepers and boarders were [End Page 554] occasionally victims of swindlers who would take up residence, rob them, and then flee to replay their con for a different crowd. Boarding was very often a harrowing experience for everyone involved.

Gamber further contends that boardinghouses became potent cultural symbols during this period. Even as many newlyweds boarded to make ends meet, cultural critics who championed domesticity believed that boardinghouses undermined marriage, made it next to impossible to raise well-adjusted children, and rendered young wives unfit to run their own homes. Perceptions of boardinghouse life also colored the attitudes of reformers who founded charitable houses for sailors, the elderly, women, and others who they felt needed saving. Rather than call such institutions boardinghouses, which implied alienation, crime, and decadence, they referred to them as "homes" and promised residents that they would provide the religious and moral guidance necessary to survive and thrive. The boardinghouse thus emerged as a powerful icon laden with meaning in an increasingly industrial society.

Gamber's book is an example of innovative social history at its best. Using a rich variety of sources, from newspaper articles to etiquette books to diaries, she plays the role of historical detective and reconstructs a largely hidden past that was often dominated by resourceful women. She does a fine job investigating the inner worlds of her cast of characters and bringing to life the sights and sounds of nineteenth-century urban life. In doing so, she demonstrates that the righteous domestic rhetoric of reformers simply did not fit the real-world experiences of thousands of urban Americans. Even more compelling is her effort to reach beyond the boundaries of existing scholarship. She underlines how boardinghouses were crucibles within which Americans negotiated such contested issues as gender identity, the lasting consequences of capitalism, and the cultural definition of domesticity in an increasingly unsettled urban industrial setting. She combines the finest insights of gender historians, urban planners, historical economists, students of American culture, and many other scholars in fresh and exciting ways.

Although Gamber's book enriches our understanding of nineteenth-century social, cultural, economic, and urban history, it is not flawless. Her decision to organize her chapters thematically, for instance, provides a panoramic view of boardinghouse life, but often does so at the cost of a compelling narrative thrust. The book's title is also a bit misleading. Rather than being a wide-ranging exploration of boardinghouse culture and changing conceptions of domesticity from across the nation, it is really a study of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other metropolises in the industrial northeast. It would have been fruitful for her to think about exactly how [End Page 555] the boarding experience in a variety of American places, such as the instant cities of the West, or racially segregated towns of the New South, differed from what she describes...

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