Looking at old films from the 1940s and ‘50s, a viewer could be forgiven for buying into Hollywood’s take on the boardinghouse, which usually involved a beleaguered white widow who only took in boarders because “nice” women had few other employment options.
Not surprisingly, the truth, especially in the South, was very different. Elizabeth Engelhardt, the Kenan Eminent Professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, argues that modern American food, business, caretaking, politics, sex, travel, writing and restaurants all owe a debt to boardinghouse women in the South.
She will discuss her new book, “Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America” on Thursday, Sept. 12 as part of the Library of Virginia’s Weinstein author series.
The inspiration for the book came out of a discussion with other food scholars about how so many of the well-known early Southern cookbooks were written by boardinghouse keepers. “I was fundamentally intrigued in learning that,” Engelhardt says. “It made me wonder what other things had happened in Southern boardinghouses?”
Once she began researching the book, Englehardt found an abundance of material beyond anecdotes included in cookbooks. During the Depression, the Federal Writers Project had sent people all over the country to record daily life and most of the writers stayed in boardinghouses, often talking to boardinghouse keepers. “There were letters, diaries, and stories of living in and running boardinghouses,” she says. “I was not hurting for source material.”
Engelhardt soon discovered that, from the 18th century well into the 20th, entrepreneurial women ran boardinghouses that were often hubs of business innovation and engines of financial independence. “Back then, women, much less women of color, couldn’t just put together a business plan and go to a bank for capital to start a boardinghouse to support themselves or their family,” she explains. “Fortunately, the boardinghouse was such a flexible model at the time that they could make it whatever they wanted.”
Sometimes what they wanted was a space where they could do as they pleased. Some, such as Mary Surratt, used their boardinghouse to advance their political causes, including the meeting in which Lincoln’s assassination was planned.
Comedian Jackie Mabley was raised in a North Carolina boardinghouse and lived in Black boardinghouses as she toured the South and Harlem perfecting her act. As she did, she made space for queer women like herself to have a home. “Boardinghouses helped broaden definitions of class and race because tenants could pass for the color or gender they chose,” Engelhardt says. “Once you shut the door of a boardinghouse, it became a very intimate space.”
In many cases, creativity blossomed within the walls of boardinghouses. Residents and owners went on to develop the South’s earliest printed cookbooks, created space for making music and writing literary works, formed ad hoc communities of support, and tested boundaries of race and sexuality. Two major food journalists, Craig Claiborne and James Beard, both grew up in boardinghouses, taking meals with whomever was boarding with the family at the time.
Engelhardt sees the legacy of Southern boardinghouse keepers all around 21st-century life. Before assisted living facilities existed, boardinghouse keepers took in old and infirm renters who had no families to care for them. In the early 20th century, many keepers boarded students in college towns lacking sufficient dormitories. “So many things like à la carte dining came to the greater public from boardinghouses,” she adds. “Pop-up restaurants, Etsy, Airbnb and VRBO are all part of the legacy of boardinghouses.”
Boardinghouses lasted far longer in the South than in other areas of the country, mainly due to Jim Crow laws. In the Northeast, apartments came to dominate the housing market for renters, but not in the South. But because of the South’s reputation for delicious food and unmatched hospitality, boardinghouse owners as far away as San Francisco traded on their Southern roots, whether real or perceived, to attract renters.
When she began the project, Engelhardt thought she had no connection to the topic. But while researching Jackie Mabley in the 1940 census, she decided to look up her own North Carolina grandparents. There she discovered that her grandmother had listed herself as a boardinghouse keeper who earned nearly as much as her husband through taking in boarders.
“That’s the great part of the book tour, being able to talk to people I wouldn’t otherwise meet,” she says. “Boardinghouses can spark the most interesting conversations.”
Elizabeth Engelhardt book talk on “Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America” will be held on Thursday, Sept. 12 at 6 p.m. at the Library of Virginia, 800 E. Broad St, lva.virginia.gov.
