A Queer History of the United States (ReVisioning History Book 1)

by Michael Bronski

While cities had always provided living accommodations for the unmarried, the new wave of single people—many of whom had immigrated to cities from rural areas—mandated many more. The options included boarding with a family and sharing a life with them, living in a boardinghouse that provided meals, or renting a room, or even just a bed, in a rooming house in which food was not served. Large cities such as New York also saw the construction of apartment buildings designed especially for unmarried people. Work spaces were often segregated by gender, and so were living conditions. Working women, even with lower-middle-income salaries, also had the option of single-gender residential hotels. (There were mixed-gender residential hotels as well.) By 1915, there were fifty-four women’s residences in New York City run by nonprofit organizations, some housing up to one hundred women.6 The advantage of these arrangements was that women were freed from the traditional “woman’s work” of shopping, cooking, laundry, and often even cleaning. In the 1930s two-thirds of the women living in the city’s residential hotels were single.7 While most of these residences catered to middle- and lower-middle-class women and men, all cities contained much cheaper lodgings for men who had extremely low-wage jobs or worked only occasionally. These cheap lodging houses, sometimes called flophouses, were usually located in poor parts of a city. In 1915, an area of only a few blocks in San Francisco’s Sou...