She had her own key.
It is a small thing, a key — but in a Chicago rooming house in the 1920s, it meant a great deal. It meant a door that was hers to lock, a room no one entered without her leave, a lamp she could keep burning as late as she pleased with no one to say otherwise. For a young woman raised to expect she would pass from her father’s house straight into her husband’s, without a single night of her own in between, a rented room with a private key was something close to astonishing. She paid for it out of her own wages. Under that roof, she answered to no one but herself.
The reformers had a word for her. They called her a woman adrift.
It was not a word these women chose for themselves. It came from the charity workers and the vice investigators and the authors of earnest civic reports — the people whose business it was to worry about the city — and it carried, folded up inside it, a whole set of assumptions. To be adrift was to have come loose from your moorings. It was to float, unanchored, away from the safe harbor where a woman was meant to stay: a family, a household, a husband, the watchful eyes of people who had known you since you were born. The word didn’t really describe where these women were. It described what the reformers feared they had left behind.
And there were a great many of them to worry about. For two generations, young women had been pouring into American cities to take up the new work the modern economy kept inventing — as typists and telephone operators, shop clerks and factory hands, waitresses and bookkeepers. In Chicago they arrived by the thousands, and a good many of them, unable or unwilling to board with relatives, did the one thing that alarmed the reformers most: they got a room of their own.
It’s worth saying plainly, because the reformers’ word rather obscures it: a great many of these women had not chosen this life at all. Circumstance had delivered them into it — a father’s death, a family too poor to keep them, a husband lost to accident or illness — setting them on their own with a suddenness that had nothing to do with restlessness or appetite. And after 1918 there were more of them than ever. The Great War had killed a generation of young men; the influenza close behind it killed more; and the marriage arithmetic that women had been raised to count on simply stopped working out. Britain, which had lost so many men that the 1921 census laid the gap bare, minted its own uncomfortable label for the women left without the husbands they had been promised: the surplus women. Two countries, two uneasy words — and beneath both the same fact: a great many women were now living lives no one had prepared them for, and for a good number of them, that life began with the key to a rented room.
They gathered in what the city called its furnished-room districts — whole stretches of neighborhood, much of the near North Side among them, given over to rooming houses where a working woman could rent a single furnished room by the week. It was not luxurious. A bed, a dresser, a washstand, a window; meals taken at a lunch counter, or cooked in quiet defiance of the rules on a forbidden gas ring; a bathroom shared with strangers down the hall. But it was cheap — it had to be, because a woman’s wages left almost no margin — and it was, above all, private.
No landlady who had known you as a child. No brothers keeping a tally of your comings and goings. A young woman in a furnished room could come home at an hour of her own choosing, keep company with whom she liked, and spend an evening exactly as she saw fit. The very anonymity the reformers found so sinister was, to a great many of the women living inside it, the whole of the appeal.
The reformers did not merely wring their hands. They built. Alarmed by the picture of young women loose in the city — a fear that ran, in those years, to a genuine panic about vice and the ruin of innocent girls — they raised an entire architecture of protective housing meant to catch the woman adrift before the city could. The YWCA opened boarding homes. Chicago had its Eleanor Clubs, subsidized residences where a respectable working girl could live cheaply among her own kind, under a roof that kept an eye on her.
Eleanor Club One, Chicago, one of the residences created to provide affordable, supervised housing for working women. Curt Teich Postcard Archives/Newberry Library. Public domain.
These homes offered real things: safety, company, a hot supper, a reputation beyond question. They also came with rules — a curfew, a matron, a register at the door, and the one that captured the whole spirit of the arrangement: no gentleman caller ever came past the lobby. A young man might sit with you in the front parlor, in full view of the house, and not one step farther.
For some women, the bargain was worth it. For a great many others, though, the watchful residence was exactly the thing they had left home to escape. Offered the anonymous furnished room or the supervised parlor, the private key or the matron’s register, many chose the room anyway — and thought the freedom worth what it cost them.
Adrift was the reformers’ word, never hers. She had a room, a wage, and a key of her own, in a city that had not yet made up its mind whether to admire such a woman or rescue her. And she went about the plain, daily business of a life she was running herself — paying the rent, keeping the hours she chose, deciding each night how long to leave the lamp burning. It was the most ordinary thing in the world, and it was also, in its quiet way, a woman remaking her life in early twentieth-century America, one week’s rent at a time.
Whether adrift was ever a fair word for her is worth a great deal more than I can give it here. That argument belongs to the fiction — and to the woman living inside it, who had, I suspect, a word or two of her own.
Della, in The Velvet Hour, is one of those women. She has a room of her own, wages of her own, and very little interest in being rescued from either. The world around her might have called her adrift. Della would have called it standing on her own two feet — and probably wondered why anyone thought they had the right to ask.