The University of New Mexico Feminist Research Institute presents, “Homes for a World of Strangers: Gender, Labor, Hospitality, and the Birth of a New Urban Household,” a lecture by Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz, UNM assistant professor of history, on Wednesday, Nov. 15, at noon in the Student Union Building Cherry-Silver Room. Light refreshments will be served.
Multiple dwellings like tenements and apartment buildings are among the most characteristic features of the American urban landscape, but our historical understanding of their origins and development -- especially the role of gender -- remains incomplete.
The standard account of purpose-built congregate housing emphasizes primarily economic factors such as urban crowding, increasing building costs, and rising rents. Sandoval-Strausz argues that there was a second, equally important line of development for multiple dwellings in America -- one that followed the spatial logic of hospitality rather than domesticity.
A crucial part of this story involved incentives based on gender and labor.
Multiple dwellings offered women the possibility of liberation from the household work that was expected of them in the domestic ideology of the day.
Sandoval-Strausz joined the UNM Department of History faculty in 2001 to teach courses on U.S. urban and legal history. He is revising his book, “or the Accommodation of Strangers: A History of the Hotel in America,” to be published by Yale University Press. His research interests include American urban, legal, business and labor history; historical and critical geography; Latino history; and Gilded Age and Progressive Era history.
Contact: Carolyn Gonzales, (505) 277-5920; e-mail: cgonzal@unm.edu