Abstract
Research demonstrates that, since the beginning of contemporary US cities, the rental market has been a site of regulation and material disadvantage for residents racialized as non-White. We know much less, however, about the other side of the coin: rental housing and those racialized as White. In this paper, I use the panic over race suicide in the early twentieth century – the perceived decline in the birth rate among Anglo-Saxon women coupled with the putative high rates of fertility of immigrant women – as a case to demonstrate how various social actors used rental housing to regulate the sexualities of (1) immigrant women (who were racialized as non-White); and (2) women racialized as White. A variety of social actors sought to reform the physical conditions and arrangements of tenements that they associated with large immigrant families and discipline residents. At the same time, developers built new buildings that were more amenable to children and landlords offered financial incentives to have babies to women racialized as White. By illuminating these bifurcated racialized practices, this article adds to work demonstrating that rental housing can be adapted and adopted for various political racialized projects. The article also reveals rental regulations and domestic space as a hitherto unknown mechanism for subsidizing Whiteness.
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Notes
“Babies: Will Pay the Rent” Cincinnati Enquirer Jul 2, 1901.
Roosevelt read Ross’s work and the two were in communication. Roosevelt invited the sociologist to call in if he was ever in Washington (McMahon 1999).
Historians document both trends in the US at the time but find no evidence of a direct association between foreign-born women and low fertility rates of native women (King and Ruggles 1990).
Searching for “race suicide” now yields over 20,000 results, which, I assume is because more newspapers have been digitized in the time between writing and data collection.
The search enabled me to search for these words within five words of each other, thereby also capturing expressions such as “the race faces suicide” as well as “race suicide.”
Meckel (1990) stresses the particularism of the urban context, however, due to its links with the public health movement amid urban growth.
I am also cognizant that making a comparison between women racialized as White and the umbrella categories “immigrant women” or “women racialized as non-White” obscures differences in regulations and rhetoric concerning women differently racialized as non-White. To be sure, government regulation and discrimination takes different forms when it against Black women, versus Native American women, versus Latinx women, versus European immigrant women, for example.
“Not More Babies But Better Care of the Few” The Sun, Jan 29, 1912;
“Bambinos of Little Italy” New York Tribune Jul 29, 1906; “Child-Ridden Janitor Tells a Tale of Woe” New York Times Aug 28, 1905; “Dr. Andrews and Race Suicide” New York Times Nov 29, 1903.
Tenement House Building Company minutes, NYPL.
Tenement House Building Company minutes, NYPL.
The focus on sanitary and efficient homes can be understood as part of the movement to modernize and rationalize domestic space (see Cowan 1983; Rutherford 2003). This new interest in the home was also tied to a shift in the profession of social work, as they began entering homes to conduct “case work,” rather than provided “outdoor” relief and assistance in the form as milk stations in urban areas (Meckel 1990). Moreover, this was part of a larger discourse within middle-class women’s organizations and feminists that idealized the home as a place of harmony and order: “the cult of domesticity” (see DuBois and Dumenil 2005; Gordon 2002).
“Tenement Building Company letter,” Tenement House Building Company minutes, NYPL.
“Deliberate Waste of life” New York Times June 4, 1911; “Model Tenements. A Description from Harpers Weekly of Jan 14, 1888,” in Tenement House Building Company minutes, NYPL; Jacob Riis papers, NYLP.
“Informal Talks: plea to save the children” New York Times Aug 28, 1905; “It Makes “Listener” Weary” New York Tribune Mar 25, 1908.
See “Infant Mortality” and “Tenement House Conditions in Lillian D. Wald papers, NYPL.
“Miscellaneous” Tenement House Building Company minutes, NYPL.
In 1903, the New York Times published a letter that claimed that the “swarms of children in the tenement districts, are now helped by milk stations, fresh-air excursions, skilled hygienic supervision, meaning that their numbers are swelling, while those of “cultured” people are not” (“Dr. Andrews and Race Suicide” New York Times Nov 29, 1903). While I assume this comment is sarcastic, the letter underscores the pervasive discursive correlation between race suicide and domestic life.
“The Reclamation of Neglected City Locations” The Architectural Review Sept 27, 1922, 260.
Ibid.
“The Reclamation of Neglected City Locations” The Architectural Review Sept 27, 1922.
Views on the relationship between race suicide and housing were not shared universally. Indeed, a 1904 article pointed out that although many people blamed the size and design of flats for the decline in the birth rate, people in rural areas – with much more space for large families – were also having fewer children “The Flat and “Race Suicide”” The Sun Jul 6, 1904.
“Anti-Race Suicide Plan: Chicago Alderman After Landlords Who Object to Children.” New York Times May 2, 1905.
Milwaukee Journal Mar 26, 1916.
“His “Baby Flats” a Success” The Washington Herald Dec 9, 1906.
“No Race Suicide Here” The Charlotte News, Aug 10, 1905.
“His “Baby Flats” a Success” The Washington Herald Dec 9, 1906.
“Babies: Will Pay the Rent” Cincinnati Enquirer Jul 2, 1901; “Rent Paid by Baby” Ironwood Times, Nov 05, 1904.
“Children in Flats” New York Tribune Sept 10, 1905.
Sex panics have entailed the fear of the masturbation epidemic in the 18th and 19th centuries, campaigns against abortion, prostitution, and pornography and more contemporary panics surrounding homosexuality and HIV in the 20th century (Herdt 2009).
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Acknowledgements
I thank Fiona Rose Greenland, Elizabeth Korver-Glenn, Mimi Schippers, Hector Carrillo, and anonymous reviewers, as well as archivists and staff members at New York Public Library and the Social Work Agency Collection at Columbia University. For research support, I thank The Sexualities Project at Northwestern.
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Bartram, R. Making Babies Pay Rent: Race Suicide, and the Subsidization of Whiteness Through Rental Housing. Qual Sociol 46, 1–20 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-022-09524-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-022-09524-4