"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.

About the Speaker

Professor Jovonna Jones is a writer and cultural historian. She is an incoming Assistant Professor of English and African & African Diaspora Studies at Boston College specializing in 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. Jovonna’s writing has appeared in Aperture, Souls: A critical journal of Black politics, culture, and society, Callaloo: A journal of African Diaspora arts and letters, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Southern Cultures (forthcoming).

About the Series

The Program in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and the Mahindra Humanities Center present “New Directions in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality,” a forum for discussing new interdisciplinary scholarship in the field of women, gender, and sexuality studies. The series features innovative work that speaks to multiple academic disciplines, methods, and traditions while forging an engaged and vibrant intellectual community.