Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America

Inbunden, Engelska, 2007

659 kr

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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.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2007-06-11
Mått152 x 229 x 21 mm
Vikt476 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor232
FörlagJohns Hopkins University Press
ISBN9780801885716

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Ms. Gamber paints an exhausting picture of the typical landlady's work and expense and the residents' grumblings. -- Nina C. Ayoub Chronicle of Higher Education 2007 Gamber does a good job introducing and discussing this once-ubiquitous institution. Choice A lively account. Book News 2008 This book is an important scholarly contribution that helps us understand how the most basic challenges of life... had a profound impact on the American past. It is a model of creative social history that encourages scholars to transcend traditional intellectual boundaries and begin new conversations in a fragmented academic world. -- Eric J. Morser Enterprise and Society 2008 Crucial reading for scholars interested in the nineteenth-century city, women's work and entrepreneurship, and the development of domestic ideology. -- Elaine Frantz Parsons American Historical Review 2008 An excellent and important book that reframes the meaning of the home. -- Amy S. Greenberg Journal of Social History 2009