In the latest issue of Reason, I review Hotel: An American History by the very sharp A.K. Sandoval-Strauss:
For the women of the mid-19th century, a fine hotel was a perilous place to be. Not only did respectable gentlewomen run the risk of consorting with prostitutes (a popular book of etiquette advised female travelers to keep a safe distance from any broad with “a meretricious expression of eye”), but extended time away from the joys of cooking and cleaning might ruin them for life. One defender of home and hearth described the lady hotel dweller this way: “Idle and lazy, and dyspeptic from the want of exercise, she becomes such a mere puppet and machine that she loses all sense of individual responsibility.”
…Hotels were a new institutional form that upset expectations about the arrangement of daily life and alarmed defenders of domesticity. They were full of beds and liquor, associated with sex, theft, and violence. Guests interacted with no patriarch—only a relatively egalitarian ecosystem of managers, porters, and bellboys. As people began to take longer and longer hotel stays in the mid-18th century, sometimes even living in them, “an entire genre of screeds against hotel living” was born, mourning the decline of traditional gender roles in a world where cooks and maids left women hopelessly idle.
As it turns out, Paris Hilton really does represent an attack on the traditional American family.
Interesting article, Ms. Howley, but it doesn’t explain why the Motel 6 finds it unnecessary to provide any small shampoo bottles or HBO. Maybe that’s why I look for the Super 8 while driving cross-country.