The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America

3 "The Most Cruel and Thankless Way a Woman Can Earn Her Living"

chapter three “The Most Cruel and Thankless Way a Woman Can Earn Her Living” A veteran landlady interviewed by the New York Times in November 1889 pronounced boardinghouse keeping “the most cruel and thankless way a woman can earn her living.” She ticked off a laundry list of grievances: “weary days and sleepless, anxious nights,” suspicious landlords, boarders who treated her “as if she were a sort of an upper servant.” Her advice to prospective boardinghouse keepers? “Don’t do it.” The “soft-voiced elderly lady with white hair and a face full of anxious lines” had this to say about the work of boarding: “I have worked harder physically than the Negro in the cottonfield.”1 Some readers probably scoffed; others may have questioned her choice of analogy. Nevertheless, her words, however exaggerated, make one fact abundantly clear: boardinghouse keeping was hard work—very hard work. Few landladies, even those lucky enough to employ servants, escaped its drudgery. Boardinghouse keeping differed little from other sorts of housekeeping, but it often meant keeping house on a larger scale. It also involved considerable labor. Whether it took place in a boardinghouse, a home, or one of the many places best described as something in between, woman’s work was never done. Like housewives and their servants, landladies and their servants washed, cooked, scrubbed, and swept. The difference between the two forms of labor rested mostly on perception. Just as boardinghouses could never be homes, boardinghouse keeping, tarnished by its association with the market, could never measure up to keeping house. Just as inevitably, this carefully constructed distinction easily collapsed under the weight of boarders’ (and sometimes landladies’) conflicting expectations. Homes could turn into metaphorical boardinghouses, and boardinghouses could turn into not-sometaphorical homes. Working “Like Trojans” What was this work that allegedly rivaled Southern field labor? Details are sparse. Boarders paid more attention to the work landladies purportedly refused to perform than to the work that they actually did. Landladies, like the anonymous boardinghouse keeper interviewed by the Times, spoke more of general exhaustion than the particulars of housekeeping. “Very tired,” Susan Forbes frequently noted in her diary. Forbes’s diaries offer a rare glimpse of what it was like to keep a boardinghouse—or, as she termed it, a private family . “Kitchen work,” “chamber work,” and laundering routinely occurred at 6 Waverly Place. Less routine were the annual spring and fall cleanings— though Forbes did not use those terms—when she and her servant washed the walls (“cleaned paint”), laundered the curtains, refurbished the parlor (“cleaning shades, glass, ornaments, etc.”), and took up carpets, beat them vigorously , and nailed them down again.2 An old lodger’s departure or a new one’s imminent arrival produced the flurry of activity that surrounded the “fitting up” of a vacant chamber—thoroughly sweeping, putting down new carpet or oilcloth (sometimes varnishing the latter), and arranging furniture as the new occupant wished.3 Like many keepers of houses and homes, Forbes—who continued to teach for nearly a year after taking up boardinghouse keeping—delegated much of the work to a single servant. Forbes baked the weekly supply of pies and cakes herself; a good New Englander, she likely served her private family pie at every meal. What she called “kitchen work,” the daily chores of preparing meals, tending the stove, and washing dishes, fell to one of the many “girls” she successively employed. Forbes “got” tea (what some called supper) twice a week; like most keepers of houses and homes she gave her domestics Thursday and Sunday afternoons off. She did the kitchen work herself only when she was without help. Unfortunately for Forbes, a childless woman who had married relatively late in life, this happened fairly frequently. She hired seven servants in the four years that she kept house; none stayed very long. Perhaps she was a particularly hard taskmistress. She dutifully recorded the subjects of her minister’s Sunday sermons; “Be perfect—be symmetrical in Christian character—diligent, patient, long suffering, etc., etc.” must have had special relevance. Forbes certainly saw herself as “long suffering;” whether servants Ann Quinn, Bridget Warren, or Ann Drury would have called her “patient” is anyone’s guess. Like many a housekeeper Forbes vented her frustrations in “The Most Cruel and Thankless Way”  the pages of her diary. It is easy enough to imagine her voicing them in person . Quinn “went to Worcester...