Emplacing Risks in the City: Class,Politics,Risk,and the Built Environment of Women’s Residential Clubs,1896-1917

Introduction

By the turn of the twentieth century, women were in high demand as part of the urban workforce in North American cities. Yet the middle-class, single, white women who flocked to cities seeking employment posed a problem for much of urban society; although industrial capitalism and the sharp rise in consumerism had begun to engage them as workers outside the home, society still associated these women with the domestic sphere. As a result, these women were—in the eyes of most—assumed to be at risk in the public city, ¹ culminating in various kinds of residential clubs for urban working women in Progressive Era cities. Perceptions of risk were not consistent across women’s residential clubs, however. The founder of Chicago’s conservative Eleanor Club, for example, posited the city as risky in terms of its public nature, the potential for inappropriate relations with men, and the lack of family-like middle-class domesticity. For the more radical Jane Club founders, risk in the city largely originated in workplaces, labor relations, and the threat of poverty. Although differences in perceptions of risk were undoubtedly linked to the clubs founders’ political stances, I bring risk to the forefront to investigate how perceptions of riskiness related to political ideology and class, as well as how class and political ideologies shaped perceptions of risk. In this article, I demonstrate how the built environments of the residential clubs can elucidate these relationships.

Urban sociologists and historians stress that the location, aesthetic, and architectural form of buildings for women relate to ideas about danger and safety in cities, how architectural strategies have been used to regulate and reinforce stratified gender relations according to ideological norms, and how expectations about gender roles can be expressed through the built form of buildings. ² Within this literature, it is well documented that housing for women in Progressive Era urban America was intended to offer protection against the threat of the city. ³ However, although scholars have discussed gendered sociospatial relations at this time, this body of literature has not engaged with theoretical work on risk. ⁴ Thus, scholars have missed a way of understanding the relationship between perceptions of risk, their putative solutions, class, and political ideology. I suggest that this relationship can be elucidated using some of Bourdieu’s concepts: fields, symbolic violence, and symbolic labor. Indeed, Bourdieu’s concepts make possible an analysis that accounts for class as well as risk and political ideology without prioritizing any component. Moreover, my article stands as a model for how Bourdieu’s theoretical framework might be applied in future research on architecture. ⁵

In this article, I borrow analytical tools from architectural historians and conceptual tools from Bourdieu to present analysis of two women’s residential clubs in Progressive Era Chicago: the Eleanor Club and the Jane Club. In so doing, I make three main points, on which I elaborate below. First, I use Bourdieu’s concept of a field to conceptualize the arena in which Progressive Era reformers struggled to control the definition of what was risky. Second, I introduce the concept of risk ideologies as a way of conceptualizing competing claims over risk in this particular field. The third main contribution of this article is the concept of risk emplacement. A kind of symbolic labor that works to reproduce economic and political interests, risk emplacement is the process through which club founders used their buildings—architecture, location, interior decoration, and entry regulations—to articulate, embody, and locate their risk ideologies. In the following paragraphs, I detail these three points further and explain the relationship between class, politics, built environments, and existing theories of risk.

I conceive of the work of reformers in Progressive Era Chicago as a field, in which transformations in the workplace and a reliance on cheap labor led to the influx of the new population of “women adrift” as well as the call for protection of this new urban populace. ⁶ Bourdieu defines fields as sites of struggle, in which social actors fight—according to the rules of the field—over the right to monopolize how the world is seen. ⁷ In the case of Chicago, different government agencies, organizations, and reformers—including settlement leader Jane Addams and philanthropist Ina Law Robertson, the respective founders of the Jane Club and Eleanor Club—struggled to define what was seen as risky. In doing so, they posited certain places, people, and relations as precarious for women. ⁸ It was within this context that women’s residential clubs, promoted by the Department of Labor as providing “protection and prevention,” could be conceived of as the appropriate response. ⁹ The way that Bourdieu conceptualizes the logic of fields sheds light on the motives of the club founders and suggests that these women were explicitly trying neither to “control” their residents to further their political stance nor to reproduce the class structure. Rather, Addams and Robertson were acting according to the logic and rules of the field in which they were immersed. Motives notwithstanding, however, Bourdieu stresses that struggles between actors within fields unwittingly reproduce class. ¹⁰

As manifestations of struggles between actors in fields, risk ideologies also work to reinforce economic and political power. I use the concept of risk ideologies in this article to draw attention to the relatively coherent logic—involving preexisting ideas about gender and political economy—that underlies what people select as risky. ¹¹ The concept thus also builds on the work of risk theorists who stress that risk is fluid and malleable, and that riskiness can be adapted and modified by certain social actors for particular ends. ¹² Conceived of in Bourdieu’s terms, risk ideologies are a kind of symbolic violence that works to render legitimate a certain way of comprehending the world.

At the heart of this article is a concern with how Progressive Era club founders articulated and institutionalized risk ideologies in physical form, as they attempted to monopolize the definition of risk. I call this process risk emplacement and consider it a kind of symbolic labor. Bourdieu defines symbolic labor as the work that transforms political or economic interests into “disinterested” meanings, thus incorporating interior décor, club regulations, and architecture. This article is not the first to demonstrate the political significance of architecture. Other studies, however, tend to focus on the explicit deployment of architectural form to express political or ideological power. As will become clear, the built environments of the women’s clubs did convey political ideologies and class dispositions, but not necessarily through design. Rather, risk emplacement, as a kind of symbolic labor, legitimates and conveys interests by obfuscating them. In the case of women’s residential clubs, symbolic laborers, such as the clubs’ founders, sought to legitimate their risk ideologies through the built environments of the clubs they oversaw: at the Eleanor Club, risk emplacement aligned risk with the public city through its location, regulations, and layout; risk emplacement at the Jane Club aligned riskiness with capitalism through the location of its club, its décor, and lack of regulations. Existing literature on risk stresses that the articulation of something as risky also acts to define a solution, rendering other resolutions imperceptible. ¹³ My concept of risk emplacement adds to this by pointing to how the built environment can be implicated in the process of establishing, embodying, and locating risk.

To a certain extent, aesthetic variations between the Jane Club and Eleanor Club buildings may have been reflections of their different years of construction and associated architectural and decorative trends. To be sure, architecture reflects dominant aesthetic discourses within the field of architecture as much as other fields such as politics. One task of this article, therefore, is to tease out how such aesthetic discourses became linked to nonaesthetic or “disinterested” concerns, such as risk, and ended up reproducing economic and political interests.

Similarly, although the clubs reproduced class dispositions and political stances, following Bourdieu, I argue that the emplacement of risk ideologies is not reducible to these interests. As forms of symbolic violence and labor, risk ideologies and risk emplacement are vehicles of legitimation, and thus require attention in and of themselves. ¹⁴ Urban scholars need to understand the built environment as constituted by but also constitutive of class and political ideologies and dispositions. This article thus serves as a call to be cognizant of class and political ideologies but also to look behind, around, and between these common sociological categories, and into architecture, location, and emplaced articulations of risk as a way of organizing people in the city and into classes and political groups. Furthermore, though derived from analysis of particular case studies, the concepts I introduce in this article offer a conceptual apparatus for understanding how gendered ideas about risk are expressed, embodied, and legitimated in any milieu and its built environment. While residential clubs for single women may no longer be a pervasive form of housing in American cities, future research could use the concepts developed in this article to turn an analytical eye to the emplacement of risk ideologies in institutional housing forms for other groups. In addition, the contentions of this article contribute to a more general concern for urban scholars: how built environments organize people, and how aesthetic concerns matter for the reproduction of gendered class dispositions and political stances.

Comparing the Eleanor Club and the Jane Club

The concepts and contentions in this article stem from analysis of the Eleanor Club and the Jane Club as well as editions of the popular middle-class women’s magazine Ladies Home Journal from 1885 to 1920. For each club, I draw on archival records, secondary literature such as newspaper reports and images of the club buildings and floor plans. ¹⁵ To an extent, the contents of the archives and availability of contextual information guided which features of the clubs I could analyze. Most often, I focused my analysis on data common across the archives of both clubs, such as regulations, location, and layouts, to allow for an even comparison across cases. Notions of risk, though conceptualized in different ways, emerged as a theme from sources pertaining to both clubs. Consequently, I incorporated existing social scientific theories of risk into my analysis, which led to the development of the concepts of risk ideologies and risk emplacement. My analysis was also informed by existing studies of built environments that stress the importance of looking at the embeddedness of buildings. Embeddedness refers to the relationship between a building and its surrounding area, movements and filters both between and through such spaces, and the importance of barriers. ¹⁶ Architectural historians who focus on gender also stress the relevance of barriers and filters as architectural strategies used to regulate the presence of men or divide public and private spaces. ¹⁷

Overall, the Jane Club and the Eleanor Club make for suitable comparison by virtue of their similar evolution, and the disparate political stances of their founders and class of their residents. As purpose-built buildings, the Jane Club and the Eleanor Club were the physical realizations of specific, albeit different, principles about housing for working women. The fact that both the Jane Club and Eleanor Club buildings were purpose-built as working women’s residences also sets these club buildings apart from other residential women’s clubs at the time and meant that their built forms were the result of consideration about how they would be used as well as past experiences of using less appropriate space. ¹⁸ The Jane Club building was built in 1898, after the success of an experimental women’s cooperative nearby. Similarly, the Eleanor Club was built in 1916 after more than a decade of experimentation with other existing buildings that the Eleanor Association had adapted to its needs. ¹⁹ Both club founders’ experience with making do with unsatisfactory buildings prompted them to fastidiously construct their own idea of an ideal building for residential women’s clubs. ²⁰ The origins and rationale for clubs are thus similar. However, as I demonstrate in the next section, the Eleanor Club and the Jane Club were built to house different classes of women, and their founders had markedly dissimilar political leanings.

Class, Politics, and Risk Ideologies at the Clubs

Although there was no shortage of housing for women arriving in Chicago, a woman’s race, ²¹ ethnicity, age, marital status, class, and income significantly curtailed available options. Although the founders of the Jane Club and the Eleanor Club—settlement activist Jane Addams and philanthropist Ina Law Robertson, respectively—both claimed to set their rent as cheaply as possible, they also clearly envisioned their club as serving a specific class of women, ²² defined as much by her income as her political disposition.

Situated in a middle-class neighborhood of South Chicago, the Eleanor Club housed women who worked as teachers, in offices, or in department stores. These women earned between $4.25 and $6 per week, at a time when the average wage for a woman was $6 for a “cash girl” and $12 for a bookkeeper. ²³ Robertson believed that The Eleanor Club “exist[ed] especially for this class.” ²⁴ And, when the Educational Department increased its wages in 1915, the Eleanor Clubs began accommodating women with higher wages. ²⁵ Such rent restrictions were also in part due to Robertson’s insistence that the club was self-supporting rather than a charity. ²⁶ Yet despite this and Robertson’s assertion that her clubs housed girls “on a low wage,” committee members stressed the need to weed out women who were “not fit” to live in the clubs because they were too old, earned too little, or even too much. ²⁷ Thus, at the Eleanor Club, the occupation or class of residents was more important than their wage.

Women’s wages were not a precondition of their residency at the Jane Club; any single woman could live there as long as she passed a trial period and was approved by existing residents. The Jane Club was part of the Hull House settlement, which from 1889 served the largely immigrant working poor in Chicago’s Near West Side. Its middle-class founders and residents were staunchly politically leftist, and campaigned in labor and suffrage movements. The Jane Club was home to women—both native and foreign born—who were likely to work in factories, as dressmakers, as printers, or in low-ranked positions in department stores. ²⁸ Moreover, although the Jane Club committee stipulated that residents pay $3 a week in rent, the first month’s rent was always paid for newcomers, and Hull House also covered rent for residents who were on strike. ²⁹ This stipulation provided needy women with a place to stay (though perhaps so long as they were needy for suitably political reasons). Although the Eleanor Club provided an emergency cot for “poorer and lonely girls,” the committee demanded that these girls be kept away from other residents. ³⁰ In short, the Eleanor Club considered women acceptable residents by virtue of their occupation, and the Jane Club deemed women suitable by their need. Both club founders also had preferences about the kind of political stance and disposition of their residents.

Ina Law Robertson’s vision for her Eleanor Clubs stemmed from a concern for the “lack of home life” of the women who served her at department stores. ³¹ This concern epitomized the Eleanor Club’s attitude toward political economy and reflected dominant middle-class Progressive Era society, for which capitalist labor relations did not seem particularly threatening, yet the social effects had to be managed. For example, the Eleanor Association aligned itself with the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC), which stated that “working girls” should be convinced to feel “dissatisfied, not with their wages or their employers, but with their own inefficiency.” ³² Eleanor Club meeting minutes also demonstrated this kind of idea. Although committee members discussed contemporary political issues, such as increasing the minimum wage, labor conditions, and suffrage at a meeting in 1914, the committee decided that providing a “good home” was more important than campaigning for better wages. ³³ The committee also told residents in 1916 that they could not attend a suffrage parade as “an Eleanor body.” ³⁴

The Eleanor Association oriented itself toward business. The Association allied with local businessmen and politicians, and offered lectures and educational classes, such as Shakespeare, millinery, gym, dancing, and business English, which were intended to “advance” the girls. Committee meeting minutes noted that girls got better jobs as a result of attending these optional classes, for which attendance was recorded. ³⁵ Similarly, in 1915, an alderman led a series of lectures at the Eleanor Clubs, the club committee members urged residents and staff members to patronize businesses that advertised in their monthly magazine, and at various times, department store owners visited the clubs with the intention of recommending them to their workers. ³⁶ In other words, through connections with businessmen and national organizations, the Eleanor Association promoted a certain kind of middle-class disposition and conservative political stance.

The ideals of the Jane Club’s founders differed from the Eleanor Association in many ways. The Jane Club, named after the Hull House settlement leader Jane Addams, aligned itself with the general politics of the settlement, which organized and held frequent labor union meetings. As the Jane Club was first established to provide homes for women who were on strike and could not otherwise afford accommodation, ³⁷ the club was not only the manifestation of particular ideas about mitigating risks but built into the Jane Club also were particular expectations of political and public engagement. These expectations were also evident in the cooperative organization of the club, which was a self-professed “little democracy,” that elected its own council from its members. Unlike the Eleanor Club and other contemporary women’s residential clubs, the Jane Club had “no house-mother or external supervision.” Rather, the women “made their own rules.” ³⁸ The Jane Club was thus a social experiment that allowed women to live according to the political principles to which they aligned. For example, while raising money for the Jane Club building, the committee turned down $20,000 from a businessman who was “notorious for underpaying the girls in his establishment and concerning whom there were even darker stories.” ³⁹ Although it is not clear if the Jane Club accepted donations from other businessmen, the refusal of such a large sum of money (even when the Hull House settlement was “often bitterly pressed for money and worried by the prospect of unpaid bills” ⁴⁰ ) is indicative of both political stance and risk ideology, which made club members wary of capitalists as well as local politicians (who Jane Addams deemed woefully inefficient and corrupt), and determined to diminish their influence over the lives of workers. ⁴¹

The cooperative living arrangement of the Jane Club, the settlement’s labor activism, and Jane Addams’s socialism framed the club’s attitude toward political economy and negotiated a very particular ideology of risk. Rather than individualizing blame like at the Eleanor Club, the Jane Club’s risk ideology held industrial capitalism at fault and sought to confront it. To be sure, differences in the founders’ political stances and the class of residents in each club were undoubtedly a cause for the divergence in the risk ideologies at the two clubs. As a kind of symbolic violence and labor, however, risk ideologies are not reducible to expressions of class or political stance (though they may indeed reproduce these social categories). Rather, as Bourdieu argues, scholars should do their best to unpack symbolic violence, as it is as important as economic or political power in the reproduction of social life and inequality. I take up this task in the following section by demonstrating the role of risk emplacement.

Emplacing Risk Ideologies

Architecture, Location, and Embeddedness

In different ways, the architecture and location of the two residential clubs posited the city as somehow risky and their clubhouse as a refuge. ⁴² Although located less than nine miles apart, the surrounding areas of the Jane Club and the Eleanor Club were vastly different. The Eleanor Club’s locale, Hyde Park, had undergone recent changes due to the 1893 Columbian Exposition, and it was soon to be the site of University of Chicago expansions. While the Columbian Exposition caused a building boom of large and imposing exhibition spaces, construction in the area after the fair focused on providing homes for families, “university bachelors,” and professors. ⁴³ Hyde Park was also in close proximity to the Union Stock Yard and the Illinois Central Railroad. Although the building was positioned among a number of large high-class open spaces left over from the exposition, the nearby meat-packing and railroad industries brought with them thousands of working-class immigrant workers. Due to its locale, the Eleanor Club could promote its location as safe especially due to the contrasting Stock Yard environs.

The Colonial Revival building built to be Eleanor Club One was set back, separated from the street by a garden (see Figure 1). The façade of this four-story steel-framed building measured almost 150 feet, its brick walls were clad in limestone, and its roof and floors were made of reinforced concrete. ⁴⁴ Residents led tours around their new building when it opened in 1917, stressing that the building was a safe place to live, the abundance of light and air, and the perfectly planned broad hallways. ⁴⁵ Lefkowitz Horowitz describes a similar association of safety and architectural features at the opening of Scripps College, during which staff drew attention to the campus’s “feminine structures appropriate to women’s nature.” ⁴⁶ Other architectural historians also equate Colonial Revival single-family homes with notions of restraint and sound judgment. ⁴⁷ Indeed, the architects of the Eleanor Club building—Schmidt, Garden, and Martin—were noted for their ability to fuse institutional building with domesticity. ⁴⁸ This was important to Ina Law Robertson, who was anxious that the building, though home to 115 residents, should not lose its “home-like feel.” ⁴⁹ The Eleanor Club’s domestic character was thus typical of residential buildings for women at the time, such as college dormitories, that were intended to “protect the femininity of young college women” by housing them in “buildings that look like houses.” ⁵⁰ The Colonial Revival architecture of the Eleanor Club is thus an example of an aesthetic concern that was linked to ideas about femininity and class. Although the building was not necessarily intended as a way to reproduce the class structure, ideologies and emplacement of risk worked to convey these interests.

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Figure 1.

Eleanor Club One, 1917.

The Jane Club focused on providing working women with a different kind of safe place to live. Intended as a secure housing option for single women on strike, the building represented a refuge from the threat of poverty. It was also important that the building was situated on a central corner of the Hull House settlement, meaning that it was in close proximity to labor organizing meetings in the Hull House quadrangle. Four stories high, but only home to around thirty women, the Renaissance Revival red-brick building had rusticated corner blocks and a flat roof (see Figure 2). ⁵¹

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Figure 2.

The Jane Club, 1900.

Quite the opposite of the Eleanor Club, the Jane Club was encircled by slums, and the surrounding area was renowned for its brothels and high crime rates. ⁵² The streets were filthy, and buildings were crowded and occupied by a very poor and largely immigrant population. In these ways, the siting of the club on this lot suggests a confrontational ideology thät associates risk with capitalist labor relations in the city rather than with the public nature of urban Chicago. Jane Club residents found themselves right in the middle of the “horrors” of the city from which—as “women adrift”—they supposedly needed protection. Importantly, although the locations of the clubs clearly served to legitimate each club’s risk ideology, an analysis resting solely on class or political ideology would miss these symbolic processes of legitimation.

Inside the Clubs: Layout, Décor, and Regulation

The clubs also emplaced their risk ideologies through decorative and architectural features inside the buildings. Figures 3 and 4 show floor plans for the first floor of the Eleanor Club and the second floor of the Jane Club, respectively. ⁵⁹ Figure 3 depicts the layout of Eleanor Club’s large and small parlors, dining room, reception hall, kitchen, and offices. The floor plan makes clear the large central entrance and a smaller back doorway. Figure 4 illustrates the clubroom, classrooms, library, office, and one bedroom that made up the second floor of the Jane Club. Apart from one window in the clubroom, all windows on this floor look out onto alleyways.

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Figure 3.

The Eleanor Club first-floor plan, 1917.

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Figure 4.

The Jane Club second-floor plan, date unknown.

These layouts were different from those of typical apartments at the time, mainly because women shared bathrooms and social spaces in the clubs. ⁶⁰ The layouts differed from contemporaneous men’s clubs, too. For example, male college dormitories had multiple entrances, each of which led to an entry hall and stairwell. Students’ rooms were grouped around these points of entry, rather than off corridors. ⁶¹ The women’s clubs also differed from the architectural style and layout of contemporaneous Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) buildings. The YMCA skyscraper in Chicago—purpose-built in 1893-1894 and discussed in detail by Paula Lupkin ⁶² —is a case in point. ⁶³ For one, the central downtown location and attention-drawing fourteen-storey Romanesque tower and steel-frame structure suggest that this building was not intended to shelter its residents from city life. Similarly striking in comparison to women’s clubs, the YMCA consisted of mixed-use space on multiple floors that mingled clubrooms with office spaces and had a basement gymnasium open to the public. Although the building was mixed use, the clubhouse and offices were mostly separate. The majority of the front of the building was occupied by offices. The rear of the building was split between offices and the YMCA facilities. Importantly, as Lupkin points out, the offices were served by dedicated stairways and elevators. ⁶⁴ Offices abutted the swimming pool and locker rooms on the first and fourth floors, however, thus bringing the building’s disparate users side by side. Similarly, although architectural layout delineated different functions, the absence of a surveillance system like at the Eleanor Club suggests that the residential/commercial delineation of space was prescribed but not necessarily enforced. In stark contrast to both women’s clubs and previous men’s clubhouses in Chicago, the YMCA skyscraper emphasized physical activity. The building was thus equipped with multiple spaces for sports, such as a gym, bowling alley, indoor running track, tennis courts, and a pool. ⁶⁵ In keeping with the emphasis on sports, themes in décor for male residential spaces at this time tended to be related to sports (or war). ⁶⁶ In general, the focus on recreation, physical activity, and the public nature of the building sets the YMCA building apart from women’s clubs. To be sure, the architects behind the YMCA skyscraper had ideals in mind. But the design of this building was centered on producing a particular kind of athletic, Christian, masculine work ethic ⁶⁷ ; the YMCA had no intention of offering its male residents protection from a risky city.

Although the Eleanor Club was built to house roughly triple the number of women than the Jane Club, similar types of rooms comprised both buildings. Echoing the dominant social and architectural practice of specification of rooms for single purposes, ⁶⁸ both clubs built rooms devoted to certain activities, such as libraries, sewing rooms, trunk rooms, parlors, and dining rooms, as well as bathrooms and bedrooms (both had single and shared bedrooms). Both buildings also had double-loaded corridors and two sets of stairs. The floor plans also show that both buildings were—to different degrees—symmetrical. While the Eleanor Club’s symmetry is obvious and organized around the main entrance, the Jane Club’s floor plan suggests a symmetry around the corridor and stairs that may not have been visible to inhabitants, since the entrance is on the west side of the building. These varying degrees of symmetry are noteworthy because of the longstanding association between symmetrical architecture and notions of order. ⁶⁹ The Eleanor Club’s explicit architectural symmetry could express order. The Jane Club’s building, on the contrary, likely did not.

Importantly, the clubs designed and envisioned their social spaces differently. ⁷⁰ At the turn of the twentieth century, parlors were primarily for entertaining ⁷¹ ; parlors in middle-class family homes were “intended to serve as the setting for important social events and to present the civilized facades of its occupants.” ⁷² Two rooms may have been used as parlors in the Eleanor Club: the clubroom and the reception room (see Figures 5 and 6). Although both appear austere and stark, the pillars and the spaciousness of the rooms help to convey the kind of sophisticated civility common in middle-class family parlors and act as a backdrop for appropriate feminine behavior. This is especially noticeable when compared with the parlor in the Jane Club.

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Figure 5.

Eleanor Club parlor, 1917.

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Figure 6.

Eleanor Club “small reception room,” 1917.

Likely due to the smaller building and number of inhabitants, the parlor in the Jane Club was not as big as the one at the Eleanor Club, and was crowded with furniture and art work on its walls (see Figure 7). Rather than attempting to communicate the civility of its occupants like in the Eleanor Club, it seems probable that the Jane Club parlor conveyed a different set of ideas through its physicality and furnishings. The arts and aesthetics of Hull House were of great importance to Jane Addams. ⁷³ As advocates for the Arts and Crafts movement—which attempted to disembed architecture and home furnishings from the practice of mass industrial production—Addams and others at Hull House believed that “all luxury is right that can be shared” and that beautiful surroundings were uplifting for the rich and poor alike. ⁷⁴ Although proponents of Arts and Crafts were primarily focused on production rather than aesthetics, the movement did progress to have a certain distinctive romantic and folk style, features of which—such as the polished wood paneling, mismatched decor, furnishings with “no uniformity,” various “pretty etchings and water colors” and cushions (that were also likely hand crafted), and assorted styles of armchairs—appeared in the Jane Club parlor, which was furnished by Addams herself. ⁷⁵

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Figure 7.

Jane Club first-floor parlor, 1900.

Again, the aesthetics of the two clubs communicated different ideas about what was appropriate for their residents. The radical nature of the decor in the Jane Club can be read as a political prompt to its residents, whereas the austereness at the Eleanor Club reinforced gendered expectations and middle-class civility. These differences in aesthetics highlight another way in which built environments can reproduce social positions and political ideology. Even though characteristics, such as decor, seem far removed from class or political stance, they can work to legitimate these very distinctions.

The ways that the clubs differed in the delineation and control of access to social spaces also corresponded with their concerns about risk and regulation. Rules about who was allowed in which spaces were particularly significant, and the layout of each building further emplaced certain ideologies of risk. Of these rules, differences in the regulation of male visitors were the most pertinent. Due to the contradictory significance of men, the regulation of male visitors was discussed frequently in Eleanor Club committee meetings. Women were expected to socialize with men to find a husband, and the committee believed that men treated women better by virtue of their affiliation with the association. ⁷⁶ However, women were also clearly believed to be morally at risk from men. Men are often deemed threatening in certain spaces, ⁷⁷ and the fact that men were both welcome and unwelcome at Eleanor Clubs required both the knowledge of appropriate sociospatial relations and a distinct negotiation of space. The heavily monitored gradual delineation between public and private space at the Eleanor Club was thus not only a way of protecting women from men but was also a means of complying with social expectations of heterosocial relations and marriage. ⁷⁸ Once male guests were inside, their movements were controlled. When visitors arrived, they passed through the entrance hall and reception hall, under the surveillance of staff and other residents, into the first-floor parlors, to which socializing was restricted. ⁷⁹ And even if visits took place in the smaller, more private parlor, it was first necessary to traverse the larger, more public parlor and thus be seen by anyone in that room. Using these architectural mechanisms, the Eleanor Club not only promoted appropriate places for heterosocial relations but also monitored the use of these spaces. In doing so, the Eleanor Club sought to restrict heterosocial relations to certain rooms and occlude other spaces. By not allowing the residents to make their own decisions about what was appropriate where, the club again attempted to emplace its ideas about risk and proffer itself as the irrefutable solution to moral danger.

The fact that there were no rules governing men’s visits to the Jane Club exemplifies their attitude toward risk. Since residents had their own keys and no curfew, and there were no restrictions on visitors, ⁸⁰ it is unlikely that there were methods of regulating entrances and exits from the club. Moreover, a 1901 article in Good Housekeeping recounts a Jane Club resident scolding a group of men attempting to look around the building, thus suggesting that there was no formal supervision of the entrance. ⁸¹ The building’s main entrance led directly into a reception room that opened out into the first-floor parlor, although, unlike at the Eleanor Club, there was also a parlor on the second floor. ⁸² Jackson claims that this room “functioned as intermediary social space between the bedrooms and the first floor’s more public receiving rooms.” ⁸³ Although it is not possible to know whether men frequented this room, the fact that there is no record of restrictions on appropriate spaces for male visitors is, I would argue, still a powerful symbol of the club’s attitude toward risk regardless of the actual presence of men.

Congruent with this risk ideology, Jane Club residents were largely free to do as they pleased, given that they had their own keys to the club building. ⁸⁴ This is striking when juxtaposed with a proposal from the Eleanor Association, which, contrary to fire regulations, requested special permission to lock the back doors of their clubs to prevent women from arriving home secretly after their curfew. ⁸⁵ Although the proposal could be regarded as an attempt to communicate to Eleanor Club residents the risks of misconduct as well as the risks of public space, to best articulate their ideology of risk, the Eleanor Club committee chose to diminish the significance of the risk of fire in the club and instead stress the risk of unregulated comings and goings. This is especially noteworthy considering the recent Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City. Thus, though the Eleanor Club prided itself on providing a safe environment, this “safety” was subjective and capable of being renegotiated. Although no records exist to show whether this proposal was enacted or not, the very discussion at the club points to the committee members’ articulation of the risk of uncontrolled gendered behavior as greater than that of fire. The proposal is also an example of a characteristic of the Eleanor Club that legitimated its risk ideology but that an analysis resting solely on class or political ideology would likely miss. There is a good chance that an analysis concerned only with class or politics would not include this proposal in a discussion of the club’s built form and would therefore have missed this strategy (and perhaps others) for organizing women in the city, because it does not appear to align to a particular political ideology or a class-based norm. As I have shown in this article, risk ideologies incorporate elements of both political ideology and class but reach beyond, behind, and between these sociological foci to offer a way of understanding how they are legitimated, reproduced, or challenged.

Conclusion

Residential clubs for women in Progressive Era urban America were intended to offer protection against risks in the city. Founders of residential clubs were thus able to posit their buildings as solutions to risks, enabling them to authoritatively articulate their ideas about what and where was risky. However, as I have demonstrated in this article, club founders had different perceptions of risk. The founder of Chicago’s politically conservative Eleanor Club, for example, posited the city as risky in terms of its public nature, the potential for inappropriate relations with men, and the lack of family-like middle-class domesticity. Consequently, the Eleanor Club aligned risk with the public city through its location, regulations, and layout. For the radical Jane Club, risk in the city originated in workplaces, labor relations, and the threat of poverty, and it aligned riskiness with capitalism through the location of its club, its décor, and lack of regulations. Thus, built form can appear to prop up femininity, domesticity, or capitalism, but it can subvert these ideologies as well. Examining the built environment is thus one way historians and sociologists might analyze how often uncontested yet powerful vehicles for legitimating and reproducing class and political ideologies.

Borrowing analytical tools from architectural historians and conceptual tools from Bourdieu, I have made three specific points about the relationship between perceptions of risk, built environments, class, and political ideology. First, using Bourdieu’s concept of a field, I have drawn attention to struggles over the control of the definition of what was risky in Progressive Era Chicago. Second, I have introduced the concept of risk ideologies to conceptualize competing ideas about risk in this particular field. My third main contribution is the concept of risk emplacement. Risk emplacement is the process through which club founders used their buildings—architecture, location, interior decoration, and entry regulations—to articulate, embody, and locate their risk ideologies. As a kind of symbolic labor, risk emplacement works to reproduce economic and political interests.

In an effort to posit the built environment as constituted by but also constitutive of class and political ideologies and dispositions, one task of this article has been to tease out how aesthetic discourses became linked to nonaesthetic or “disinterested” concerns (such as risk), which ended up reproducing economic and political interests. While differences in architecture and aesthetics at the Jane Club and Eleanor Club were undoubtedly linked to the clubs founders’ political stances, this article has brought risk to the forefront to investigate how perceptions of riskiness related to political ideology and class, as well as how class and political ideologies shaped perceptions of risk. In short, although the clubs reproduced class dispositions and political stances, Bourdieusian concepts provide a language with which to argue that the emplacement of risk ideologies is not reducible to these interests.

Future researchers thus might use the concept of emplacing risk ideologies to evade reducing characteristics of built environments to only class or political leanings. To be clear, I am not suggesting that scholars ignore class or political stance but rather incorporate what is known about how these variables structure built environments with a better understanding of processes of legitimation. In fact, attending to processes of legitimation (such as risk emplacement) may actually enable researchers to better understand other forms of institutional housing (such as shelters for the homeless and victims of domestic violence or perhaps even contemporary college dormitories). Although class or politics may not appear relevant for these institutional housing types, in reality these categories and dispositions may indeed play a role in the organization of residents and the legitimation of class distinctions and political stances.

In this way, the concepts of risk ideology and risk emplacement are not only applicable to industrial Chicago. Rather, by virtue of their capacity to obscure or reveal social relations, risk ideologies are able to politicize ideas of what is dangerous and what is safe in any era or milieu by putting forward certain relationships between people, employers, states, or government. Importantly, this article has pointed to how the articulation of any definition of risk in a society requires legitimation, which, for Bourdieu, occurs through symbolic violence: the legitimation as dominant a view that is actually arbitrary. The concepts I have advanced in this article thus offer a useful framework for understanding how gendered ideas about risk are expressed through and embodied in any built environment. Other scholars might incorporate Bourdieu’s theoretical framework into work that addresses dialectical relationships between class dispositions and other political and ideological stances. While residential clubs for single women may no longer be a pervasive form of housing in American cities, the contentions in this article contribute to a more general concern for urban scholars: how built environments organize people, and how aesthetic concerns matter for the reproduction of gendered class dispositions and political stances.