The “Other” Sex and the City: Nineteenth-Century Boarding Houses for Women in the United States

In The “Other” Sex and the City: Nineteenth-Century Boarding Houses for Women in the United States, Maïna Cazenave-Cloutier examines the boarding house as a crucial yet deeply ambivalent dwelling type in the history of women’s urban autonomy. Against contemporary accounts that treat solo living as a recent phenomenon, the essay traces its material prehistory to nineteenth-century American cities, where industrialization, migration, and women’s entry into waged labor generated new forms of residence outside the nuclear household. Through a series of case studies—including converted boarding houses, the Lowell mill boarding houses, the Jane Club, the Margaret Louisa Home, and Chicago’s Eleanor Clubs—the essay reconstructs how distinct forms of boarding house emerged from different economic, institutional, philanthropic, and religious conditions. Although these environments were shaped by supervision, moral regulation, and classed and racialized hierarchies, they nevertheless provided many women with a first material threshold toward economic independence. By collectivizing meals, care, and domestic labor, the author argues, that boarding houses partially displaced women's dependence on the private household and made possible new forms of self-agency and solidarity beyond marriage, inherited kinship structures, and the ideological horizon of the single-family home.