We produced this podcast for the Columbia University class, “Global History of Housing Justice” in the Fall of 2020. The course explored the deep history of urban segregation, fights for healthy and safe housing, and scholarly and political debates about the “planet of slums.” This episode revolves around the gendered nature of access to affordable, safe and healthy housing in a place that is close to the hearts of all three producers, New York.
In the late 19th century New York City was booming with industry and commerce, which attracted many newcomers both from rural areas and abroad. In 1850 the city had around 600,000 residents. By 1900, however, that number had swelled to 4 million. But how did the city cope with that exponential growth? Where were all these people living?
The city was simply not equipped to accommodate so many newcomers. It didn’t have enough housing, and what it had was increasingly expensive. Many working-class families could only afford housing if they took in boarders or lodgers. As a result, often two or three families occupied a single three- or four-room apartment. And just like today, access to quality housing was divided along class lines. Poor people lived in the city center in overcrowded and unhealthy rooms. The rich, by contrast, were able to move farther away from the city’s center and lived in row houses, brownstones and apartments.
As New York became more and more industrialized, several fields began recruiting female laborers. Women were particularly sought after in garment production. Many of these workers were young, single women on their own for the first time in a major city. It was especially hard for women with few connections in the city to find an affordable and safe place to live, so many single women ended up renting rooms or living in private boarding houses. By 1910 there were around 68,000 women boarders in Manhattan alone!
In this podcast, you can learn about the history of housing options developed for single women in New York as an alternative to private boarding and lodging.
Women were often at a disadvantage among boarders: they ended up paying more than men for worse accommodations. Most boarding houses didn’t allow women to host friends, and privacy was rare because most owners sub-divided and sub-sub-divided to reap as much profit as possible from their units. In addition to unaffordable rents, girls in the city often experienced loneliness and overcrowding.
Moral reformers were intensely worried about women who were not in touch with social agencies and were living in mixed-sex boarding homes. They called them “girls adrift” and wondered what would happen to them in these settings with little or no privacy and no supervision over their behavior. Segregating women from the regular boarding market became a matter of preserving Victorian ideals of propriety and maintaining separation between women and the city.
The idea of separate housing for women emerged in the post-Civil War era among well-off Christian ladies. They were concerned with the fates and reputations of young, single women moving into the city to work. In the late 1850s the Ladies Christian Union began operating the first all-female housing in New York City. The LCU homes provided a safe, affordable, and genteel place to live, but there were many strings attached. Girls living in LCU homes in the post-Civil War period had to follow strict protocol. The idea was to train girls from the lower classes in middle-class gentility for their future lives as wives and mothers.
Later, there was a gradual shift in the logic of women’s accommodations, and this translated into an expansion in the offerings available to single working women. Things slowly started to move away from the overbearing strictness and moral urgency of the early Christian homes. New models emerged that catered to the needs of young women without regulating every aspect of their lives.
Around the turn of the century, working-class women with higher salaries and middle-class women started to rent their own apartments alone or with friends. For many working class, black and immigrant women, however, this was not available and for them the only alternative was the so-called “organized homes.” While they did charge rent, these homes were not business ventures but rather had an openly social mission. Their aim was to provide safe and comfortable living spaces for girls who would otherwise have to live in boarding houses.
Organized homes had their roots in those earlier LCU houses but were more diverse in terms of the rules they mandated, the services they offered and the women they served. These homes offered superior services and a better environment than most regular boarding and rooming houses. They provided community, and while many of them continued the tradition of moral and social programs, some homes began offering vocational training, too. There were also homes catering to specific religious, racial, or ethnic backgrounds.
One example was the Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls, a Jewish non-sectarian home founded in 1897 by a group of female Jewish leaders who were concerned with the welfare of young working girls in New York City. Here, residents had many privileges and there were few rules because its founders sought “to make it a home and not an institution.”
At the same time, there was a growing need for upscale housing among middle and upper-class female professionals, which resulted in yet another type of all-female housing: the apartment hotel. One famous example was the Martha Washington Hotel, an upscale apartment hotel that was actually founded by a group of female entrepreneurs in 1903. It differs from the housing models that came before because it was “a business enterprise” and was free from the “paternalism or philanthropy” of the moral housing programs.
While housing for single white women was scarce, safe and affordable housing for Black women was even more so. In the post-Civil War period, New York became a major focus of the Great Migration. African Americans migrating up from the South competed for housing with poor immigrants in a highly saturated housing market.
Organizations began cropping up to address the lack of safe and supportive housing programs for single Black women. One such organization was the White Rose Mission, a settlement house
established in 1897 on the Upper East Side to aid young African American migrant women who had recently arrived in the city. It was the first Black social settlement managed for and run by Black women. The founder of the White Rose Mission opened the home to provide Black immigrant women with respectable lodging, guidance and direction.
In addition to delving into many more details regarding the Clara de Hirsch Home, the Martha Washington Hotel and the White Rose Mission, in our podcast you can also hear about the challenges we faced as we were doing research for this project. And if you think that these homes are the thing of the past, we also have a surprise waiting for you!
Works Cited
Here are the sources we have used for our podcast, so if you are interested, you can explore
this topic in more detail:
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Blackmar, Elizabeth. Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850 . Cornell University Press, 1989
Chudacoff, Howard P. and Judith E. Smith. The Evolution of American Urban Society . Prentice
Hall, 2000.
Clara de Hersch Home for Working Girls , Press of the Keystone Printery, 1905.
“The Clara de Hirsch Home, A Place Where Working Girls May Receive Shelter and Obtain Instruction in Domestic Science.” New York Times , May 23, 1899.
https://www.nytimes.com/1899/05/23/archives/the-clara-de-hirsch-home-a-place-where-working
-girls-may-receive.html
“The Clara De Hirsch Home for Working Girls.” The American Jewess , vol. VII, no. 5, 1898.
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Friedman, Reena Sigman. “Clara De Hirsch Home for Working Girls.” Jewish Women: A
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women . Curbed New York , March 8, 2017.
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Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books
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Featured Image: Jewish Women’s Archive. “Interior of the Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls.” (Viewed on January 31, 2022) <https://jwa.org/media/clara-de-hirsch-home-still-image>.
