Join author Elizabeth Engelhardt for a conversation and book signing for her work Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America, which highlights fascinating and important facets of women’s history in the United States.

From the eighteenth century well into the twentieth, entrepreneurial women ran boardinghouses throughout the South. Owned and operated by Black, Jewish, Native American, and white women, rich and poor, immigrant and native-born, these lodgings were often hubs of business innovation and engines of financial independence for their owners.

Boardinghouse Women draws on a vast archive to recover boardinghouse women’s stories, revealing what happened in the kitchens, bedrooms, hallways, back stairs, and front porches as well as behind closed doors—legacies still with us today.
Copies of Boardinghouse Women will be available to purchase onsite at the event, while supplies last.

A book signing will begin immediately following the conversation.