A Rooming House for Transient Girls: Tracing Black Women's Spatial Vision in a Mid-Century Suburb

New Directions in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality

SPEAKER: Jovonna Jones, Boston College

"A Rooming House for Transient Girls" traces the spatial vision of a house for Black women north of Chicago. Founded in 1924 by the Iroquois League--an African American women’s club--the North Shore Community House was intended to be a home-away-from-home for Black women working as domestics in white households, and for Black women students who were not allowed to live in dormitories with white women. Rooming houses for single/unmarried Black women were common in Great Migration cities in the first half of the 20th century. Like the settlement houses of early reform movements, some rooming houses hosted women and girls who had been marked as socially deviant and classified as vulnerable to urban vices, and prepared them to enter the domestic workforce so they could earn a living. The Iroquois League, however, shifted their approach away from the social and moral uplift of their residents. Instead, they emphasized the material and practical concern of housing for Black women in a town that rendered them invisible beyond their labor. The Iroquois League utilized the tools of planning and property to create a haven in a hostile landscape, and rendered Black women's quality of life a priority in and of itself.

Jovonna Jones is an Assistant Professor of English and African & African Diaspora Studies at Boston College specializing in photography and visual culture, spatial aesthetics, and Black feminist criticism. Her research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, and the Thurgood Marshall Predoctoral Fellowship at Dartmouth College. Her writing has appeared in Aperture, Souls, Callaloo, Southern Cultures, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Jovonna holds her PhD and MA from Harvard University and BA from Emory University.