A House of Her Own: The Real Women Behind Boardinghouse Keeper Mrs. Ferguson
If you've spent any time in Buckhorn Gap, you know Mrs. Martha Ferguson. She was protective of Lily in The Widowmaker’s Bride (the scene in Chapter 13 where she lights a fire under Dan’s backside is one of my favorite in the book.) She looked after Maggie in Doc O’Brien Meets His Match, being both the voice of reason and a shoulder to cry on. Her advice: “One has to be patient with men sometimes. Well, much of the time.” She’ll play another key role in the upcoming Book 3.
She’s got a dry wit, the wisdom that comes from years of having seen it all, and she’s entirely in charge of her own boardinghouse and everyone passing through it. Sometimes readers want to know what inspired her. The honest answer is that I didn't have to invent her so much as let her in. Women exactly like Mrs. Ferguson kept the doors of the nineteenth-century West, and the real history of what they did is far more interesting than the cozy parlor it looks like from the outside. So let me tell you about the women who actually ran those houses.
The age of the boardinghouse
We tend to picture the 1870s as the great age of the private family home: the snug parlor, the wife at its moral center, the whole tidy Victorian ideal. That notion of the importance of the family home didn't arrive by accident. For half a century, an entire culture had been busy promoting one main idea about a woman’s purpose, what historians would later name the Cult of True Womanhood, or the cult of domesticity.
Advice writers like Catharine Beecher and magazines like Godey's Lady's Book, read aloud in parlors across the country, preached its catechism: a true woman was pious, pure, submissive, and above all domestic, the moral heart of a home that was her whole proper sphere (see the previous blog post regarding the “proper sphere” on Maggie’s Sinclair’s role as a journalist) With women raised on these doctrines for generations, this ideal stops looking like a persuasive argument and begins to be considered a social norm.
That picture is real, but it's only half the story. The same decades were also the great age of the boardinghouse. In the growing towns and cities of nineteenth-century America, by the best estimates historians have, somewhere between a third and a half of all urban residents were either taking in boarders or living as boarders themselves. Far from being the exception to the norm, the boardinghouse was one of the most ordinary places in American life. The the single-family ideal idolized in the literature of and social commentary of the day was partly defined against it, the way a clean room is defined against the one in your house that you don’t show to visitors.
And who ran them? Almost always, women. A large majority of boardinghouse keepers were widows, but married and single women also ran boardinghouses. A woman who had a house, or could rent one, could turn the one asset a respectable woman was permitted to command — a home — into an honest living.
Both respectable and a little countercultural
Here is the part I find irresistible, and the part that made Mrs. Ferguson possible. Keeping a boardinghouse was respectable. For a widow especially, it was one of the very few roads to real economic independence that didn't cost her the good opinion of the town. She could earn decent money, answer to no husband, and keep her children, if she had them, under her own roof while she did it. This was a combination almost no other work of the era offered a woman. In a world that gave women painfully few ways to stand on their own feet, this one was sanctioned, even admired.
And yet, the very same institution made the era's moralists deeply nervous. A house full of unrelated people looked to reformers like the opposite of a home. (We’ll talk about the age of reform in another blog post.) Where the private home was supposed to be a sanctuary sealed off from the world of business, the boardinghouse brought business right into the parlor. In a boardinghouse, a woman was using her domestic rooms, which in the family were a sacred space, for profit. By the 1880s, some American reformers were writing about boarding and lodging as a social problem, a threat to the American family itself.
So the boardinghouse keeper lived in the contradiction between a lofty ideal and economic and social reality. She was a pillar of respectability, yet being a businesswoman painted her with a slightly different brush than the homemaking wife. She was a woman of unimpeachable virtue who was also offering food and shelter for money. If you have ever wondered why Mrs. Ferguson can be both the town's moral compass and also the one woman in Buckhorn Gap who seems to operate just slightly outside its rules, that’s the answer.
The work nobody thanked her for
I won't romanticize it, because the women themselves couldn't afford to. The labor was often overwhelming and largely invisible or taken for granted. A boardinghouse keeper cooked, cleaned, and did laundry for a houseful of people from before dawn until after dark, or had to pay for help with this; she kept the accounts, managed meals, smoothed over quarrels, and collected rent. While boardinghouse keepers often earned a solid living, they worked hard for every penny.
That's the quiet steel under Mrs. Ferguson’s dryness. When she gives advice to our story heroines, she isn't a sweet older woman dispensing platitudes. She’s a woman who has fed strangers at one table for years, watched every kind of human being pass through her rooms, balanced her own books, and learned exactly what she will and won't put up with. She has earned her opinions the hard way.
The heart of the frontier town
Out West, these houses were vital both socially and economically. In a new territory where most arrivals couldn't afford to buy land and build, the boardinghouse was where many people got a start. Settlers, travelers, the single man come to work the mines, the woman arriving alone and needing somewhere safe before she got settled all found shelter at boardinghouses. Because of the communal nature of life, the boardinghouse became the social engine of the town. The news passed through its parlor. It was where a community that hadn't existed five years earlier actually assembled itself into a community.
There's one more frontier wrinkle worth knowing. Women were scarce in the early West, and scarcity is leverage. A woman with the in-demand skills of cooking and housekeeping, and the space to provide these services, could negotiate terms that her sisters back East could only dream of. Some frontier women built solid incomes out of this economy. The West was no paradise, and it was hard on women in many different ways. But many women found the social rules less restrictive, as the realities of necessity made accommodations to Eastern social norms. For all its challenges, it was a time and place where a woman in the right position actually held some economic power.
So, look at her again
The next time Mrs. Ferguson answers a letter in the newsletter or counsels one of the younger women in the series, I hope you'll see her a little differently. She's standing in one of the few positions of genuine independence a woman of her time and place could occupy, and she's standing in it with both feet. She runs her own house. Vitally important: she answers to no man. (She’s been there, done that and isn’t looking to do it again.)
She has seen everyone and everything the road brings in, and she has formed her own settled opinions about all of it. She brooks no nonsense and does not suffer fools gladly. She’s often the voice of reason, and she can guide the younger women in handling the men in their lives because she has yet to meet a man she can’t size up in five minutes. So, pull up a chair in her tidy parlor and watch her make running a boardinghouse look easy (which it decidedly wasn’t.) the women of Buckhorn Gap look up to her, and to be honest, I do too.
Sources:
Wendy Gamber, The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). The standard scholarly work, and the source of nearly every surprising fact in this essay — including the argument that the cozy single-family ideal was partly defined against the boardinghouse next door.
Encyclopedia of Chicago, "Boardinghouses," at encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/152.html
For Further Reading
Joanna L. Stratton, Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier (Simon & Schuster, 1981). Built from some eight hundred firsthand memoirs that the author's great-grandmother, a pioneering Kansas lawyer, collected from aging frontier women and left unfinished in an attic for fifty years. Frontier women telling their own stories, in their own words. The closest thing I know to sitting at Mrs. Ferguson's table and listening.
Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America (University of North Carolina Press, 2024). The natural next step if the keepers themselves are what caught you, it’s a vivid argument that these women were engines of independence and quiet hubs of business innovation.
