{"title":"A Rooming House for Transient Girls: Black Women's Spatial Vision in the Black Metropolis","authors":"Jovonna Jones, Nancey B. Price","doi":"10.1353/scu.2024.a934711","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This essay traces the spatial vision of a house for Black women north of Chicago. Founded in 1924 by the Iroquois League—a Black women's club—the North Shore Community House was a \"home-away-from-home\" for Black women arriving in Evanston, IL, for education and domestic work. Rooming houses were a common source of additional income for Black residents in Great Migration cities but drew much social criticism. Rooming houses were considered to be places of vice, immorality, and deviance. Like fellow women's clubs, the Iroquois League hoped to protect and uplift their residents through collective living and cultural programs. But when faced with the threat of closure, they shifted their emphasis away from the moral character of their residents and toward the structural politics of housing. Drawing on archives from the Evanston History Center and Shorefront Legacy Center, this essay offers a close study of world-building and shows how one club secured space for Black women in a city that rendered them invisible beyond their labor.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":42657,"journal":{"name":"SOUTHERN CULTURES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4000,"publicationDate":"2024-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"SOUTHERN CULTURES","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/scu.2024.a934711","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"HISTORY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract:
This essay traces the spatial vision of a house for Black women north of Chicago. Founded in 1924 by the Iroquois League—a Black women's club—the North Shore Community House was a "home-away-from-home" for Black women arriving in Evanston, IL, for education and domestic work. Rooming houses were a common source of additional income for Black residents in Great Migration cities but drew much social criticism. Rooming houses were considered to be places of vice, immorality, and deviance. Like fellow women's clubs, the Iroquois League hoped to protect and uplift their residents through collective living and cultural programs. But when faced with the threat of closure, they shifted their emphasis away from the moral character of their residents and toward the structural politics of housing. Drawing on archives from the Evanston History Center and Shorefront Legacy Center, this essay offers a close study of world-building and shows how one club secured space for Black women in a city that rendered them invisible beyond their labor.
期刊介绍:
In the foreword to the first issue of the The Southern Literary Journal, published in November 1968, founding editors Louis D. Rubin, Jr. and C. Hugh Holman outlined the journal"s objectives: "To study the significant body of southern writing, to try to understand its relationship to the South, to attempt through it to understand an interesting and often vexing region of the American Union, and to do this, as far as possible, with good humor, critical tact, and objectivity--these are the perhaps impossible goals to which The Southern Literary Journal is committed." Since then The Southern Literary Journal has published hundreds of essays by scholars of southern literature examining the works of southern writers and the ongoing development of southern culture.