Single Review on past events

Katherine Fama researchs on the modern American novel focuses on domestic architecture and independent women. In her talk, Fama introduced her central research questions about the emergence of modern singleness: Why did single women and their new urban rental homes become a focal point of late-19th-century American fiction? How is the modern single woman historically specific? What is the relationship between modern American novels, domestic rental architecture, and the social history of the single woman? How have race, class, and culture shaped these relations?

She offered a note on interdisciplinary method, noting that her project weaves three disciplinary approaches together: Literary Studies, Social History, and Vernacular Architecture. Her research examines jointly the modern surge in stories of single women, the late-century demographic peak in never-married women, and the emergence of urban rental architectures like the boarding house, apartment building, and women’s hotel. As a literary scholar, Fama introduced the ways that fiction writing and reading can affect both social practice and material space. The modern novel, for example, imagined new design forms and uses, legitimized marginal occupancy practices, and modeled new gender roles. Reciprocally, architecture affected social and literary practice. The turn-of-century rental room created new spaces of independence and cohabitation that disrupted the traditions of the family house. After this, Fama briefly shared a few research challenges and successes, in attempting to locate rare novels and photographs of working women’s rooms. She discussed the uses of online archives, which provide searchable texts with which to further research terms like “spinster,” “bachelor girl” and “women’s hotel.” She shared favorite archival texts and objects from the project and concluded, that female independence and housing, remain inexorably linked. Following, she offered a case study from her book project, a reconsideration of black women’s rental and occupancy patterns at the turn of the twentieth century.

In conclusion, Fama returned to her research questions, gesturing to a demographically significant rise in never-married women in the late nineteenth century. She argued that modern singleness was inseparable from women’s new spatial independence from the family. Single women moving to the city for social and professional reasons used and shaped the city’s new rental architecture of boarding houses, apartments, and hotels. Likewise, this modern single woman and her rental home inspired a change in the late 19th-century American novel. The long-familiar form of the marriage plot was transformed by single endings, strong unmarried characters, and delayed and disrupted marriages. Fama noted the importance of race, class, and gender to this story, emphasizing that recovering accounts from the margins has been especially important to her project. She urged attention to both familiar accounts, and to “missing stories” that might offer new perspectives and accounts of censorship and community regulation.