| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America. By Wendy Gamber. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. xiv, 213 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-80180-571-6.)

The efflorescence of domesticity and exaltation of the home in the second quarter of the nineteenth century has been parsed by historians over the last thirty years. "Without a doubt the nineteenth century was the golden age of the home," Wendy Gamber tells us in her introduction (p. 2). But when was a home not a home, and how did living arrangements defined as not-homes construct and problematize those arrangements that did qualify as homes? The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America examines both the day-by-day functioning and the cultural significance of what came to be called "the American institution": the range of dwellings providing shelter and meals to paying residents (p. 8). The nineteenth-century discourse of domesticity frequently juxtaposed the cold mercenary atmosphere of boardinghouses against the warmth of the authentic home. Through meticulous research and sparkling prose, Gamber demonstrates that boardinghouses simultaneously served to construct the "genuine" home and, in many cases, actually afforded homes to their inhabitants.

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