Concerns for the Family
Nineteenth-century industries and businesses created work environments and work lives that were increasingly isolating, large-scale, and controlled by people distant from the family. In response, the role of home and family as the most important and nurturing sphere of life took on greater importance, especially to housing reformers. As Veiller put it, "Where there are no homes there will be no nation." In 1911, Dr. Langley Porter (the founding president of the San Francisco Housing Association) wrote that the "health of the individual, physical and moral, and health of the community, physical and moral, both depend in no small degree on the dwelling in which the individual is housed." People who felt (as another activist put it) that home and family were the "crucible of our happiness" saw the notion of people living alone, or family groups living in uncharacteristic ways, as a clear danger to several aspects of the Victorian middle-income family.[16]
Undermined Domestic Roles and Rituals
Women who lived in hotels—particularly those residents of palace and midpriced hotels who could afford the alternative of a single-family house—ran the risk of becoming spoiled by caravansary comforts. They also inevitably violated the Victorian requirements of true womanhood—being a proper mother and an active homemaker.[17] In 1857, the editors of Harper's Weekly declared that hotel women were "rapidly becoming unfit not only to be mothers, but to be wives, and members of society at all" (fig. 7.3). They could "neither work, nor talk, nor cook, nor make a bed." Worse yet, they spent "their whole life in gossiping with people of both sexes who are as idle as themselves."[18] Early critics also warned that the inappropriately lavish habits and empty materialism learned in expensive hotels would follow young couples into their mature years.[19] In 1905, Edith Wharton saw the fulfillment of such prophecies. She characterized fashionable New York hotel women as socially objectionable:
Figure 7.3
This reposing room in a Turkish bath, about 1904, typified the self-indulgence
and empty lives that hotels made too easy for women of wealth.
[They were] . . . wan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity from restaurant to concert hall, from palm-garden to music room, from "art exhibit" to dressmaker's opening.[20]
It was all, Wharton said, a "vast, gilded void of existence." Other commentators found midpriced hotels less gilded but still empty. In 1923, hotel maids told Hayner that life at a midpriced hotel "made bums out of women." Their days consisted of sleeping until noon, shopping, playing bridge, taking beauty naps, dressing for dinner, and going out in the evening. One maid called the late-sleeping women "sundodgers."[21]
Interior decorating—assembling the middle-income family's material individuality—relied particularly on the mother. Critics wrote that a hotel mother could not "create that atmosphere of manners and things around her own personality, which is the chief source of her effectiveness" and her power over her husband and the development of her children.[22] Data in the 1920 census alarmed Bertha Nienburg, who wrote that Rochester, New York, had 11,500 married women (out of 74,000 total) who were eating at restaurants or living with relatives and thus not keeping house. These women, said Nienburg, may have been "succeeding in their function as guardians of the family," but they were
"not contributing to the permanence and stability of civic life through the maintenance of homes."[23] An unhappy woman who had lived in a hotel concluded that "the only endurable kind" of day to have while living in a hotel was a "day busy elsewhere."[24]
Ironically, "being busy elsewhere" was exactly why hotel life appealed to many women of the middle and upper class. Part of the hotel's threat to the true cult of womanhood was that it freed women with nontraditional lives—those who had paid vocations (as doctors, teachers, or secretaries) or active volunteer careers (with charities or other organizations)—from the roles of decorating, entertaining, and doing little favors for their families. Inasmuch as such women threatened the dominant culture, their hotel homes were a threat as well.
Also prominent in the sins of hotel life was its reputation for breaking the ritual and privacy of the family dinner table. William Dean Howells said that for the proper family, private dining was the "moral effect of housekeeping." At the table, or in the parlor after meals, the ideal family was supposed to linger for conversation, companionship, and reading or embark on spontaneous family excursions. Public dining flaunted the model family meal supervised by the mother, presided over by the father, and attended by children at their accustomed chairs receiving instruction (figs. 7.4, 7.5).[25] To the 1903 editors of Architectural Record , communal dining was "the consummate flower of domestic irresponsibility, . . . the sacrifice of everything implied by the word 'home.'"[26] In restaurants or in boardinghouses, regular seats could not be assigned, and parents could not discipline their children without feeling public scorn. Families did not even have to eat at the same time. If they did eat together, they often scattered after the meal: father to the lobby to talk with men about business or politics, mother to a bridge party, daughter to a dance, and son to the billiard room. Hotels presented almost no friction of distance to retard this family dispersal, while suburban settings imposed a great deal of such friction. Burgess put it in the terms of an urban sociologist: the "small family group in apartment houses and residential hotels" was "the most notorious illustration of effectual detachment from the claims of kinship."[27] The lack of control in the dining room extended to the rest of the hotel home. In common halls or public lobbies, strangers and chance acquaintances had ready access to children. Mothers could not strictly control what their children saw in daily life.[28]
Figure 7.4 and 7.5
Two of a series of 1871 Harper's Weekly cartoons by Thomas Nast comparing hotel and home life.
Left , the tranquil and protected family dining room; right , a rough and noisy dining room in a
mid-priced hotel of that period.
Also threatening the mainstream role of wives was the fact that hotels made possible a cultured, civilized life for men without the aid of a woman. To be sure, cheap lodging houses did little to substitute for women's care. So, too, the stereotypical homeless or single man was a nasty, gruff brute who proved how much men needed the civilizing influence of a home with a woman to take care of him (fig. 7.6). However, hotels in the better price ranges could provide domestic care as well as, or better than, a woman could. In some cases, then, the maxim "what every man needs is a good woman," became "what every man needs is a good hotel ."[29] Hotel life not only threatened to spoil men and women for predetermined roles but also threatened to erase the roles themselves.
Individualism versus Marriage and Child Rearing
Observers of hotel life saw resident pipe fitters, maiden aunts, and mobile professional people as abnormal for several reasons. Beginning as early as the 1840s, critics worried that hotel life delayed marriage for single residents; for married couples, hotel life also seemed to delay child bearing.[30] According to Wolfe in 1906, the distractions of living downtown rendered people selfish and self-centered and emphasized "the individual life at the expense of the family and the home." Marriage became "too great a sacrifice"; children meant "expense and trouble and constant attention and 'being tied down at home.'" The American standard of living, he continued, was becoming an individual standard rather than a family standard. Roomers learned very soon the art of
Figure 7.6
"How We Sit in Our Hotel Homes." This engraving from an 1857 Harper's Weekly story about
living in New York City hotels showed how much men needed traditional home life.
"seeking everywhere the greatest individual comfort at the least expense.[31]
Hotel living did imply childlessness. On the one hand, hotel and rooming house zones had the lowest birthrates for most cities and stood in sharp contrast to home-ownership areas with their high marriage rates and birthrates. In 1900, 95 percent of those owning houses in San Francisco were married, and 81 percent had children. Looking at these phenomena, social scientists and reformers did not assume market sorting as an explanation, that is, that unmarried childless people simply chose hotel housing. Instead, the reformers concluded that hotel housing caused the antifamily phenomena.[32] Based on the long history of problem children in hotels, housing professionals and hotel residents agreed that the environment suited children poorly.
To social arbiters, worse than delayed marriage or child bearing was never marrying at all. About one-tenth of the American population typically has never married, and as much as one-third of New York City's population lived alone in 1930. Yet, through the 1950s, Americans widely considered the condition of being unattached as either temporary or abnormal. The premier housing scholar, James Ford, wrote that having few contacts with married couples, children, and people
outside one's own age and sex group tended to make the lives of hotel people seem aberrant. Wolfe spoke of marriage "rescuing" tenants "from the rooming house world and its sophisticating, leveling, and contaminating influences." Chicago social workers visited groups of workingmen who were sharing apartments and were surprised that the men were "extremely friendly," as if hospitality and friendliness were found only in family households.[33]
The relative absence of children was responsible for much of the unnatural character of single-room districts. Zorbaugh, the Chicago sociologist, felt that children were the real neighbors; childless districts therefore lacked a key catalyst of neighborly feeling. Sociologists noted that children forced adults to plan and hope for the future and to consider other-directed action. While child-filled tenements sparked hope (or its frustrated form of outrage), hotel housing rarely evinced either.[34] In order for there to be a proper neighborhood for children, the majority of American middle and upper class families also typically demanded yards or gardens. The reliance on yards as social separation zones related to another cluster of hotel critiques.
Demands for Separation and Low Density
For centuries, wealthy burghers in Europe lived only a floor or two away from their place of work and from their poorest employees, apparently with no significant contagion of poverty. By 1900, in America, such density, mixture, and adjacency were becoming highly suspect in the view of reformers. Critics chided comfortable hotel families who lived in suites of rooms for having a lack of privacy. Residents in cheaper hotel types were criticized for living with too little space per person and for mixing disparate activities in the same room.[35] Reformers blamed some rooming house crowding and mixture on un-American housing standards brought by immigrants from southern Europe, where large families often lived in one or two rooms. Social workers also deplored as "a demoralizing lack of privacy" the European habit of having the same bedroom occupied by grown brothers and sisters. Hull House social workers called a married couple and a child living in one or two rooms an "irregular method of living." What was combined in one room, they said, should have been separated and sorted out in "parlor, bedroom, clothes closet, dining room, kitchen, pantry, and even coal shed." Building inspectors
Figure 7.7
Pathological proximity. A rag picker and a middle-class
woman, at such close quarters, emphasized the
social schisms of urban life in 1875.
ruled that cooking in bedrooms caused vermin problems, dirtied bedding, and problems of inadequate ventilation of cooking odors.[36]
The fear of mixture and the desire for separation also manifested themselves in critiques of the "lodger evil"—the practice of families taking in unrelated men or women as renters. Lodgers often shared family bedrooms. Also seen as unwanted mixture were the "invasions" of housing districts by corner grocery stores, multiple dwellings, small factories, and repair shops. In reformers' eyes, lodgers blighted home interiors just as mixed land uses and traffic congestion blighted residential streets and suggested transitional social character (fig. 7.7).[37]
At the turn of the century, social workers and settlement house leaders also encouraged families to stop mixing social life, family relaxation, and work areas of the home. Most often, this had occurred in the crowded family kitchen—in tenements, then called a living room. Instead, the reformers urged immigrant families to invest in a formal parlor. As Lizabeth Cohen has stressed, separating kitchen and parlor functions met reform goals of creating sharp divisions between public and family interactions and of separating family members from one another within the house.[38]
Between 1870 and 1920, separation between family dwelling units and between commercial and residential land uses also became increasingly urgent imperatives. Jacob Riis decried that 80 percent of the
Figure 7.8
The possible horrors of shared
plumbing. A basement toilet room
in a New York City tenement.
crimes in New York City were perpetrated by individuals who had "either lost connection with home life, or never had any, or whose home had ceased to be sufficiently separate, decent, and desirable."[39] The word separate was notably first in his list of the necessary criteria for housing. The poor maintenance and overuse of shared toilets in slum residences led reformers to urge building codes that required private toilets and baths for each dwelling unit (fig. 7.8). The majority of architecturally oriented reformers saw dense urban housing as "promiscuity in human beehives." Decongesting the city called for smaller buildings, more open space, and spreading population out along suburban transportation lines. Interwoven with these desires was a growing preference for the open-lot house, set back from the street and from its neighbors, in place of the more urbane row building that nudged close to the sidewalk.[40]
Apartments and hotels, the critics said, also possessed the inherent flaw of shared entrances and halls. The term "apartment house," one committee said, was "simply a polite term for tenement." In the views of most reformers, store owners were no longer to live above the store, nor apprentices to live immediately adjacent to their work. To progressive reformers, any multiple dwelling inherently lacked "domestic quality"; moreover, the poor acoustical privacy of shared dwellings would intensify marital discord. There was, as one critic put it, "a short cut
from the apartment house to the divorce court."[41] Yet compared to such perceived threats to families, hotel life was held as an even greater hazard for single people.