[Wendy] Gamber, a historian at Indiana University Bloomington, wrote the first book dedicated to boardinghouses as a general phenomenon in 2007. In her accessible “The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America,” she argues that in a century obsessed with the idealized home, boardinghouses represented a potent contrast: “If homes were private, boardinghouses were public,” she writes. “If homes nurtured virtue, boardinghouses bred vice.”
...
Boardinghouses “served people who really [couldn’t] get a foothold in urban space any other way,” explained Betsy Klimasmith, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston and author of a 2005 book about urban domesticity in American literature.