Baltimore’s First Restaurants, 1839-1856: Gender And Consumer Culture In Antebellum America

Abstract

In the 1840s, the concept of dining out for amusement became, for the first time, a prominent part of the culture of the city of Baltimore. The most problematic characteristic of restaurants, for mid-nineteenth-century Baltimore, was that they intended their customers to include both men and women from the middle and upper classes. Women of privilege proved to be generally uninterested in patronizing the businesses, which they associated with already existing and hyper-masculine eateries that were dangerous for them to enter. The consumer choices that Baltimore’s women made about where to dine out during the1840s and early 1850s helped produce gender-segregated restaurants (with one parlor for single men, and one for couples and ladies) as the dominant form of diningroom design in the following decades. The early restaurants of Baltimore, despite their unique position in the antebellum South’s largest city, have received less attention from historians than those of New Yorkor Boston. This paper (essentially an exploration of sixty Baltimore Sun advertisements from 1839-1856) addresses that issue from a critically understudied perspective: failure.