A Rooming House for Transient Girls: Black Women's Spatial Vision in the Black Metropolis

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.