The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America

Essay on Sources

essa on sources Like a house, this book rests on a foundation. And if the edifice remains shaky, the foundation—secondary literature representing a wide variety of topics and subfields—is sturdy indeed. What follows is necessarily a partial and idiosyncratic sampling that emphasizes the studies I found most helpful ; by no means should it be considered an exhaustive compilation of relevant scholarship. There is a vast literature on the nineteenth-century home, both as a material artifact and a cultural ideal. Key works include Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, – (Yale University Press, 1977); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, – (Cambridge University Press, 1981); Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the Modern Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural Conflict in Chicago, – (University of Chicago Press, 1980) and Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Pantheon, 1981); Clifford Edward Clark Jr., The American Family Home, – (University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Glenna Mathews, “Just a Housewife”: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (Oxford University Press, 1987); Richard Bushman , The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (Knopf, 1992); Kenneth L. Ames, Death in the Dining Room and Other Tales of Victorian Culture (Temple University Press, 1992); Jane C. Nylander, Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of the New England Home, – (Knopf, 1993); Kathryn Grier, Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, – (Smithsonian, 1997); and Bernard L. Herman, Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, – (University of North Carolina Press, 2005). See Kristin Hoganson, “Cosmopolitan Domesticity: Importing the American Dream, 1865–1920,” American Historical Review 107 (February 2002): 55–83, for a fascinating discussion of the global implications of domestic consumption. Elizabeth Blackmar’s Manhattan for Rent, – (Cornell University Press, 1989) and Jeanne Boydston’s Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (Oxford University Press, 1990) are especially important for unmasking the fiction of domestic isolation. Both show that—the rhetoric of separate spheres notwithstanding—homes were indeed workplaces that were always connected to the marketplace, and that the apparently sturdy boundaries between private and public were always illusory. I am particularly indebted to Boydston’s notion of the pastoralization of housework . For further explorations of these themes, see Joan Jensen, “Cloth, Butter , and Boarders: Women’s Household Production for the Market,” Review of Radical Political Economics 12 (Summer 1980): 14–24; Jeanne Boydston, “The Woman Who Wasn’t There: Women’s Market Labor and the Transition to Capitalism in the United States,” Journal of the Early Republic 16 (Summer 1996): 183–206; Amy Dru Stanley, “Home Life and the Morality of the Market ,” in The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religious Expressions, –, ed. Melwyn Stokes and Stephen Conway (University of Virginia Press, 1996), 74–96; Catherine E. Kelly, In the New England Fashion: Reshaping Women’s Lives in the Nineteenth Century (Cornell University Press, 1999); Angel Kwolek-Folland, “Cows in Their Yards: Women, the Economy, and Urban Space, 1870–1885,” unpublished paper, 2001; Elizabeth White Nelson , Market Sentiments: Middle-Class Market Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Smithsonian, 2004); Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, “Abigail’s Accounts: Economy and Affection in the Early Republic,” Journal of Women’s History 17, no. 3 (2005): 35–58, and Robin Veder’s manuscript in progress, “Shrine of Flora/Temple of Mammon: The Pastoralization of Flower Gardening in Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Culture.” The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America joins Jeronima Echeverria , Home Away from Home: A History of Basque Boardinghouses (University of Nevada Press, 1999), and Stephen A. Mrozowski, Grace H. Ziesing, and Mary C. Beaudry, Living on the Boott: Historical Archaeology at the Boott Mills Boardinghouses, Lowell, Massachusetts (University of Massachusetts Press, 1996) as one of three books that focus exclusively on boardinghouses. Nevertheless, I rely heavily on the insights and findings of numerous works that examine boarding—albeit sometimes only briefly—in the course of discussions of class, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, business, employment, housing , politics, and urban life, as well as articles that focus more specifically on the subject. These include James Sterling Young, The Washington Community, – (Columbia University Press, 1966); Michael B. Katz, The People of  Essay on Sources Hamilton, Canada West: Family and Class in a Mid-Nineteenth-Century City (Harvard University Press, 1975); Wright, Building the Dream; Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American...