Writing Back to the "Beautiful Home for Working Girls": Literary Challenges to the Charity Home

Late-nineteenth and twentieth-century American fiction often focused upon newly independent, unmarried women in the literary and material architectures of the modern American city. The end of century witnessed two events constitutive for modern singleness: a crisis in the marriage plot and a revolution in urban domestic architecture. While many novels featured privileged women’s independent lives in inherited houses and new rental apartment architecture, working-class and immigrant fictions often continued to rely on the marriage plot and home ownership. But an emerging group of popular fictions also explored working women’s domestic rental options. This paper traces working-class women’s fictionalized experiences of charity housing and their continuing efforts to reform, reimagine, and remake private and institutional homes of their own.

I will focus on Dorothy Richardson’s The Long Day (1882), Anzia Yezierska’s Arrogant Beggar (1927), and Sinclair Lewis’s Ann Vickers (1933), popular novels centrally concerned with the material and social conditions of institutional charity and settlement homes. These novels challenged the social and spatial controls and mission statements of charitable institutions. I trace the shifting domestic imagination of immigrant and working-class women as they replace institutionalized marital imperatives with aspirations for independent rooms, communal collaborations, and professional success. This paper explores a pattern of persistent literary interventions into charitable domestic spaces and recovers the agency of working-class inhabitants and writers. These novels preserve a range of working-class single perspectives—from residents to institutional staff and undercover journalists— each contesting and reclaiming the meaning of independence, privacy, and home.