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[Singles studies Seminar series] “Rigid, Fusty, Bigoted Nests”

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Presentation title: “Rigid, Fusty, Bigoted Nests”: Writing Back to Homes for Single ‘Working Girls’

Speaker: Dr. Katherine Fama (University College Dublin.)

Date: 4 February 2025, 1600-1730 (UK time).

Online (zoom) link: https://universityofleeds.zoom.us/j/83167496054?pwd=vVcWcycmxJYwzCScZcJDs808aAcQYp.1

 

Abstract

Nineteenth century U.S. publications and papers are dominated by accounts of singly blessed women who were disproportionately White, native born, and monied. Their accounts reveal both the tight constraints of unmarried life and patterns of single respectability, vocation, and privilege. Though such accounts dominate the textual record, demographic evidence suggests an underrepresented, population of singles marginalized along lines of race and class.

By the fin de siècle and turn of century, during a demographic peak in never married women, fictions began to represent the experiences of working-class, migrant, and immigrant single women. Across the “epoch of single women” that marked the end of century, writers expressed their desire for “a home of one’s own.”[1] While the writings of the fin-de-siecle and early century express great contentment in the “delicious”[2] apartments, inherited houses, and even boarding rooms secured by relatively privileged singles, there were more conflicted accounts of working-class single residences.

This presentation’s focus on charity homes and employer boarding houses reflects the long tradition of temporary housing and institutional supervision of unmarried working women: from early mill housing and family boarding to college dormitories and charity homes. Unlike the evolving stability and independence of many rental homes, harsh restrictions, limited capacity, and relative cost made charity homes and employer-sponsored housing unpopular. Such residences were lampooned in fictions by Anzia Yezierska, Helen Campbell, and Dorothy Richardson.

I have elsewhere argued the importance of independent, tenable single-occupancy rental architectures —boarding and lodging houses and apartments— for the development of single women in the modern era. Laboring single women’s negotiations of less beloved domestic spaces were equally formative. This talk will examine single women’s written critiques, resistance, and alternatives to privately and institutionally controlled domestic spaces. Writing back to charitable homes and employer boardinghouses, literary characters critique the regulation, instability, and missions of such urban residences. Institutional “homes” operated in complex relation to their contemporary alternatives: tenement rooms, domestic service, and women’s clubs. Residing between these spaces, single women renegotiated their relations to the family, peer networks, and the conflicting promises of marriage, work, and independence.

 

Bio

Dr Fama is Deputy Head of the School of English, Film, and Drama at University College Dublin. She co-directed the Single Studies Research Group at UCD, served on the Steering Committee of the International Singles Studies Association, and co-chaired the Irish Association for American Studies until this year. She is currently completing a monograph entitled The Literary Architecture of Singleness, which uncovers the reciprocal relationship between the early 20th-century novel, domestic architecture, and the single woman in America. She coedited the 2022 collection, Single Lives: Modern Women in Literature, Culture, and Film and has recently published on single occupancy architectures, representations of single ambivalence, and unmarried women and ageing. Dr. Fama’s work has been published in MELUS, Studies in American Naturalism, the Journal of Modern Literature, and Emotions: History, Culture, Society and elsewhere.

[1] Susan B. Anthony, “Homes for Single Women” (1877), in The Elizabeth Cady Stanton-Susan B. Anthony Reader, Ed. By Ellen Carol DuBois, Northeastern UP: 1992, p. 146.

[2] Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920), D Appleton & Co., p. 9.