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6 "Will They Board, or Keep House?"
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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chapter six “Will They Board, or Keep House?” “Will they board, or keep house?” For Eunice Beecher, wife of the famous— soon to be infamous—preacher Henry Ward Beecher, this was the momentous choice newly married couples faced. Beecher’s domestic advice books, compilations of the columns she published in the Christian Union, counseled newlyweds to avoid boardinghouses at all costs. Hers was only one voice in a larger chorus that lamented the evils boarding visited on marriage. Advice writers, novelists, short story authors, newspaper reporters, magazine commentators, legal theorists, and home economists almost always weighed in on the side of keeping house. Boarding, they reasoned, was uneconomical, undesirable, and a threat to marriage itself. Or, as Judge John A. Jameson wrote in an article on “Divorce” published in the North American Review in 1883, “Boarding-house life is especially fatal to permanence of the marital relation.”1 Why did boarding threaten marriage? The answers varied. Some observers invoked privacy, others economy. Some worried about wayward husbands , others about delayed childbearing and spoiled children. Perhaps they worried most about the effects of boarding on married women’s labor— though they danced around the question of whether housekeeping was indeed work. Defending housekeeping, which numerous analysts deemed fundamental “to the marriage relation,” had unintended consequences. In opposing boarding, commentators of various stripes offered increasingly flexible definitions of home, helping to pave the way for grudging acceptance of “French flats” and apartments. Demonstrating the superiority of housekeeping over boarding, moreover, meant plunging into mundane details that often revolved around real costs: rents, household budgets, food and fuel prices, and servants’ wages. Advocates of housekeeping won one cultural battle , for their efforts surely hastened boardinghouses’ slow demise. At the same time, they lost another, for they revealed the home’s intricate relationship to the marketplace. “High Rents and Pretentious Habits” “One of the peculiarities in the lives of Americans consists in the practice of boarding,” German traveler Francis Grund wrote in 1837. “Single and married men, and whole families, prefer this mode of life, to taking lodgings by themselves, or going to the expense of housekeeping.” Like many foreign visitors , Grund considered boarding a peculiarly American practice and the boardinghouse a peculiarly American institution. He was one of few observers, foreign or domestic, who condemned neither. “Whatever inconvenience may be attached to this habit, it is, nevertheless, commendable on the score of economy . . . Many young men, who cannot afford renting a house, (which in America is very expensive,) are in this manner enabled to marry a little sooner than their means would otherwise allow them.”2 As Grund’s matter-of-fact statement suggests, home life in nineteenthcentury America did not necessarily imply home ownership. The vast majority of urban dwellers, whether they boarded or kept house, lived in rented quarters; renting was common practice even in towns and villages. Even a rented house was beyond the reach of many middle-class Americans. To be sure, couples had almost as many reasons for choosing the American institution as detractors had for condemning it. Some preferred hotel and boardinghouse sociability to domestic isolation.3 Others wished to escape the burdens of housekeeping. Still others preferred transience to permanence, freedom to attachment. But urban couples most commonly chose boarding because they could not afford “homes.” Given this fact, social commentators might have railed against low wages and salaries, the high cost of housing, or, more generally , the high cost of living.4 They might have heaped scorn on boarding husbands , chiding them for inadequate breadwinning or insufficient ambition. In general, they did neither. Men did not always emerge blameless from the pages of popular commentary, but it was their willingness to indulge their spoiled spouses rather than their economic failures that usually engaged critics ’ attention. Women shouldered the heaviest symbolic burdens, shoring up their husbands’ masculinity and deflecting attention from exploitative real estate markets. Married couples boarded, so numerous stories went, because wives were selfish, lazy, extravagant, and poorly trained in the art of domestic management.5 “If the tastes of our people were better regulated, and mere show was not preferred to substance, there would be less resort to the hotel or boarding- "Will They Board, or Keep House?" [3.81.79.135] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:01 GMT) house on the plea of moneysaving,” Harper’s Weekly complained in 1857. “The tastes of our people” usually translated into the misguided inclinations of extravagant wives, though Harper’s satirical account of the...