The history of Chicago's Department of Health offers a particularly vivid illustration of the ways ideas about the privacy of the family home were transformed in an industrializing city in the late nineteenth century. In casting housing as a health problem, officials and health reformers reframed the relationship between public and private interests and rights. As expanding industries threatened air and water quality in cities, corporate leaders fended off government regulation by asserting that their private property rights were protected by the due process clause of the constitution. Chicago's health department, however, moved almost unnoticed to assert a public interest in regulating low-cost housing and to constitute a new version of the private family living within a working class home. By the mid-1870s, city officials faced a host of complaints about the spread of epidemic disease in tenement districts. The new health commissioner introduced regular inspections of the homes of the city's poor and laboring classes. In casting tenement housing as a threat to the public health, the health department articulated a public interest in regulating the interior space of the working class home. And, in a city where government regulations and services were minimal, the health department established a government presence in ordinary people's lives.
Learning Objectives:
Keywords: History, Housing
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
Organization/institution whose products or services will be discussed: None
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.