Boardinghouse Women

How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America

By Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt

Boardinghouse Women

Approx. 288 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, notes, bibl., index

  • Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-7640-1
    Published: November 2023
  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-7639-5
    Published: November 2023

Paperback Available November 2023, but pre-order your copy today!

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In this innovative and insightful book, Elizabeth Engelhardt argues that modern American food, business, caretaking, politics, sex, travel, writing, and restaurants all owe a debt to boardinghouse women in the South. From the eighteenth century well into the twentieth, entrepreneurial women ran boardinghouses throughout the South; some also carried the institution to far-flung places like California, New York, and London. Owned and operated by Black, Jewish, Native American, and white women, rich and poor, immigrant and native-born, these lodgings were often hubs of business innovation and engines of financial independence for their owners. Within their walls, boardinghouse residents and owners developed the region's earliest printed cookbooks, created space for making music and writing literary works, formed ad hoc communities of support, tested boundaries of race and sexuality, and more.

Engelhardt draws on a vast archive to recover boardinghouse women's stories, revealing what happened in the kitchens, bedrooms, hallways, back stairs, and front porches as well as behind closed doors—legacies still with us today.

About the Author

Elizabeth Engelhardt is Kenan Eminent Professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
For more information about Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"Black, white, comfortable, poor, straight, gay, male, female—southern boardinghouses had a place for everyone. Elizabeth Engelhardt beautifully illuminates life in these once-ubiquitous houses, which may have blended into the historical background but powerfully shaped the region and nation."—Rebecca Sharpless, author of Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South