A Hotel of Her Own: Building by and for the New Woman,1900-1930

Abstract

This article examines the little-known phenomenon of apartment hotels built for single middle- and upper-class women during the early decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on New York City, where the first and most influential of these residences opened, this study argues that upscale women’s apartment hotels severed the Victorian equivalency between home and family, and reconfigured home as a site of women’s independence and self-fulfillment. They also helped redefine women’s economic role; rather than engaging elite women as consumers of household goods, apartment hotels engaged them as consumers of housing and as real-estate developers. As women’s apartment hotels moved from amusing experiment to markers of twentieth-century modernity, they etched the New Woman’s individuality, ambitions, sexuality, and civic engagement into the urban landscape.