A Fleeting Utopia: The Rise and Fall of the “Women’s Hotel” in American Cities

The women’s hotel left no lasting mark on the American city. It was born in the nineteenth century, then briefly prospered and died within the compass of the twentieth. In the 1930s, perhaps two or three such hotels could be found in Denver, Seattle, and Dallas, with a few more each in Philadelphia, New York City, and Washington, DC, but they never became either popular or reliable. Most residents did not stay longer than two or three years, and those who did stay longer usually suffered from straitened circumstances. None of them held a unified definition of collective living. Few of them shared ideals. There were no Oneidans among them. Their heyday was briefer than that of the Shakers, and their legacy weaker. It is possible that the nineteenth century had seen such a supersaturation of utopian societies spring up and wither along the river valleys of the eastern states that no desire for perfection survived into the next.

Whatever the cause, the abbreviated popularity of women’s hotels sparked no consequent movement and left behind no organized legacy. They served as short-term stand-ins to replace those now-lost, sometime-consecrated institutions for feminine maintenance that had once served as catchments for the middle class and superfluous: religious houses, country schoolrooms, the ever-retreating frontier, ladies’ seminaries. They were made obsolete by the credit card, by hippies and the New Age movement, by lesbianism and feminism, by the increase in affordable apartment stock and the increased acceptance of premarital cohabitation. The residents of these hotels did not rent in quite the same way we use the term today.

Almost anyone who rents an apartment today expects, and is legally entitled to, not just a private bedroom but a bathroom and a kitchen too; these women paid at the end of every other week for a single room, a shared bath at the end of each hallway, and half their board. They were neither short-term guests as at a standard hotel, nor quite independent bachelor girls responsible for their own housekeeping either. And of course they could do no entertaining. There was nowhere to put guests and nothing to refresh them with had there been room. Their socializing was either cloistered inside with their fellow residents or somewhere else out in the world. Today almost all these buildings have been bulldozed and replaced with something more useful or gutted and refurbished and converted into condominiums, often very expensive ones, with unlisted rates.

Why live in this way? Had these women no family or friends in the city who might rightly be expected to take an interest in them on arrival, no private homes that might have admitted them, that they should live in a hotel? So wondered the acquaintance of the first Biedermeier residents upon learning of their intention to “take rooms” in the early days, when residential hotels, except for the most palatial, were seen as a poor substitute for family living.

The acquaintance of latter-day residents, who considered residential hotels at worst an encumbrance and at best an oddity that ought to have died with the speakeasy, wondered why they didn’t go all the way and enter a convent. Few of the women would have given the same answer to the question, and possibly none of those answers came near the truth: to live somewhere that was socially and professionally accepted by everyone, and yet was decidedly, categorically not a home.

Not being prepared to commit themselves to a mode of living that might have excited comment (there were, of course, women living together privately in twos and threes all over New York during this same period, but informal arrangements between women had a habit of falling apart under even mild external disruption), they nonetheless sought to establish themselves in the city with the fewest possible number of social ties, keeping acquaintance and expectation at bay.

To disappear in a large city is no especially difficult task, but to disappear without ever exciting remark, without compelling a flurry of letters and telegrams or visits from the home folk, requires careful accounting and economy of movement. Such ties cannot be cut abruptly or all at once; it jars an entire network of invisible interests and prompts others to repair the rupture in angry determination. Ties must instead be slackened gently and at long intervals, and not dropped before some other node has been built up over the abandoned junction.

Let my new book, Women’s Hotel, be taken for no more than what it is: a diffuse sketch of a short-lived, patchwork commonwealth, a few impressions of a manner of living that was briefly possible for a small group of women in the middle decades of the last century. It is a story of provisional, often unwilling, cooperation between people with no real allegiance to one another, the diary of some women, and a few men, who occasionally found themselves sharing the cells of unheaded and deconsecrated abbeys, and were sometimes glad of it.

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Excerpted from Women’s Hotel by Daniel M. Lavery and reprinted with permission from HarperVia, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright © 2024. Featured image: Boston Public Library, used under CC BY 2.0