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Urbanization and the Malleable Household: An Examination of Boarding and Lodging in American Families

1973; Wiley; Volume: 35; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/350582

1741-3737

John Modell, Tamara Κ. Hareven,

Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism

The challenges to traditional values posed by the urbanization of American society included by the late nineteenth century new and widespread doubt that the family was capable ofwithstanding the pressures to which it was exposed. One aspect of family life upon which this lack of faith focused was the common practice of taking into the household boarders or lodgers.' What once had seemed genial practice, way of providing at once temporary accommodation and family setting for those who lacked their own menage, now seemed threat to the institution of the family itself. James Quayle Dealey expressed the setting of the anxiety nicely in 1912, when his Family in Its Sociological Aspects likened even the modern urban family (biologically defined) to a temporary meeting place for boarding and lodging, where strangers entered while family members passed large portions of their time on the streets or in other company (Dealey, 1912:90-91). By this time, however, boarding and lodging within the family had been under attack for quarter of century, and somewhat diffuse but nevertheless damning bill of particulars had been drawn up against it. The present paper seeks to suggest the social and economic significance of this transit of values, while exploring the extent and functions of the institution of boarding within the family.2 Family governance was the lynchpin of the Puritan theory of social control, as it was in less dramatic form of the whole English tradition ca ried over into the American republic (Morgan, 1944; Demos, 1970; Farber, 1972: ch. 2; Flaherty, 1972: ch. 2). In its multiple functions as workshop, church, an asylum, and reformatory the Colonial family included boarders as well as servants and apprentices and dependent strangers. The presence of strangers in the household was accepted as normal part of family organization. Town governments customarily boarded the homeless, poor or juveniles with families for fee. The first federal census, taken in 1790, showed very small proportion of persons living alone (3.7 per cent of households were of one person only, as compared with nearly 20 per cent in 1970). Even frontier state in 1820, peopled almost entirely by newcomers to the region, saw all but 2.7 per cent of its white households with two or more living together (Rossiter, 1909; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1972; Modell, 1971). Inspection of census enumerators' manuscripts from 1850 onward reveals large numbers of persons recorded as in established households of otherwise predominantly nuclear structure, who were either juveniles, distant relatives, apparently unrelated persons of simi*Modell wishes to thank Winifred Bolin, whose student work on lodgers has contributed insight into their importance. Hareven is grateful to Stuart Blumin, Maris Vinovskis, Richard Jensen, Stephen Shedd, and Randolph Langenbach for their advice and expert help. Research on the Boston data in this essay was supported in part by the Clark University Graduate Research Fund, and the Clark Computer Fund.