Gamber The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America

Erscheinungsjahr 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4214-0259-8
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 0 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gamber, Wendy

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Houses and Homes
1. Away from Home
2. Keeping House
3. "The Most Cruel and Thankless Way a Woman Can EarnHer Living"
4. Boarders' Beefs
5. Nests of Crime and Dens of Vice
6. "Will They Board, or Keep House?"
7. Charity Begins at Home
Epilogue: "Decay of the Boarding-House"
Notes
Essay on Sources
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Gamber, Wendy
Wendy Gamber is the Robert F. Byrnes Professor in History at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of The Notorious Mrs. Clem: Murder and Money in the Gilded Age, also published by Johns Hopkins.