When I landed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to report on Capitol Hill as a junior in college, I immediately reached for my phone, fingers shaking as I typed out texts to everyone I knew. I couldn’t wait to live out my dream of becoming a political reporter—and then, reality sunk in. I had to find an affordable place to live for three months, no small feat in DC.  Enter Thompson-Markward Hall (TMH), a historic dorm at 235 2nd St., NE, with 120 rooms, home to women ages 18 to 34, staying anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of years. When I first saw the listing, I hesitated. An all-women’s dorm that dates back to 1887? I imagined girls taking forever to get ready in the bathroom, dorm mothers enforcing attendance at mandatory communal dinners, and receptionists giving anyone not wearing a TMH lanyard the third-degree at the front desk. But then I saw the price: just $1,100 for a single room located steps from the Supreme Court, with most meals included and a built-in community of fellow ambitious transplants. Suddenly, it seemed too good to pass up.  Inside TMH, the living room felt frozen in time. A golden chandelier hung from the ceiling, a grand piano commanded the center of the room atop a red-patterned carpet, and newspaper clippings boasting about Eleanor Roosevelt’s appearances at the dorm lined the hallway walls. (In 1934, she came to dedicate a new convalescent wing, and three years later returned to celebrate the home’s 50th anniversary).  Next came the paperwork, which included some rules: pay rent on time, no smoking or drinking, and don’t bring men past the first floor. When my dad offered to help me carry my luggage to my room, the receptionist quickly stopped him. No boys allowed, not even dads.  While I can’t say I was fond of the bathrooms, which occasionally flooded, or the menus that left vegetarians without many options, I came to love living at TMH. Every day, when I walked past the dorm to Union Station, I looked forward to seeing what new protest fliers had been pasted to the lamp posts overnight. Every night, I had friends to sit with at dinner. Somewhere along the way, I became curious: in a city where almost every single-sex dorm has gone co-ed, how has a semi-Puritanical throwback nicknamed “the convent” by its inhabitants survived for nearly 150 years? Photograph of the TMH living room in September, 2025. Photograph by Emma Sullivan. In the beginning  TMH’s story begins in 1862, with a woman named Mary Wilkinson. The wife of a Lincoln appointee, she arrived in Washington and immediately noticed the desperation of young women displaced by the Civil War, which ultimately would create more than 200,000 widows. Many had nowhere to live and couldn’t support themselves—at the time, women couldn’t vote, manage their own money, or sign contracts. Wilkinson set aside two rooms in her home at 232 C Street for young women looking for work in Washington. Some newspaper accounts suggest she also was moved to act after the death of her own daughter. She subsequently opened a series of progressively larger homes, part of a larger movement to provide safe, supervised housing for “respectable young women” moving to cities for work — yes, that’s the exact language you’ll find in Washington Post clippings from the time.  Opportunities for women in Washington expanded during the war, especially in government offices, where many found positions as secretaries. But living in the city alone wasn’t straightforward. Financial logistics aside, the million-dollar question remained: could a woman live on her own and still maintain her “virtue?” “They needed a place to stay and society was more comfortable thinking of them being in the equivalent of a dorm with a dorm mother and rules and locked doors at night than being on their own in the ‘big, scary city’ where they were often confused with prostitutes,” says historian Susan Ware, an expert on twentieth century American women’s history. “Because what other women were living on their own in the cities in the 19th century? It was prostitutes.”  Eventually, Wilkinson needed help. It’s not entirely clear from historical records how she managed to draw the attention of Congress, but in 1887, the Young Woman’s Christian Home—later renamed to Thompson-Markward Hall—received a congressional charter signed by John Sherman, then president pro tempore of the Senate and later best known for the Sherman Antitrust Act, which outlawed monopolistic business practices. “All of a sudden the powerhouse people on the face of the Earth are involved with this work,” says James DeLorbe, president of DC firm DeLorbe, Manderlay Wilde, who has been researching the material in TMH’s archives. The charter itself didn’t come with much power, but it did put the Young Woman’s Christian Home on people’s radars. Soon after, Congress approved an annual $1,000 appropriation, enough to rent a small house and keep the home running. That assistance continued until 1906, when the board running the dorm deemed it to be financially self-sufficient. Wilkinson was among the board’s original members. Rooms cost no more than $1 a day and included two meals. Women paid what they could, and those who temporarily lost their jobs were not turned away. Constitution of the Young Woman’s Christian Home. Photograph by Emma Sullivan. How they lived Like DeLorbe, Jennifer Sharp, the current executive director of TMH, has been digging into the stories of the women who first lived at the Young Woman’s Christian Home. Who were they? What brought them to DC? While we don’t know exactly who most of these women were, the dorm’s archives tell us a lot about how they lived. When looking through the artifacts with Sharp, I noticed a plaque of rules that must have once hung in the dorm. Girls couldn’t use the telephone past 10:30 PM, guests had to leave by the same hour, anyone planning to be away overnight had to inform the superintendent, and devotions and dinner took place at strict, scheduled times each day.  The Board of Trustees spelled out the house rules for residents on a plaque. Photograph by Emma Sullivan. “If it’s anything like a college dorm in a women’s college back then, they’re not getting much freedom,” says Ware, the historian. “I do think what they’re getting is a sense of independence, of living on their own. They’re having a job, and they’re sharing meals and bathrooms and elevators with a bunch of other like-minded women, so it would have given them that sense of community.” It would be a stretch to describe the historical dorm as “feminist”—at least in the way we think about that term today. Still, it was a lifeline at a time when women were often shut out of economic independence, in part by offering a platform for building careers. Within its walls, women could hold jobs without a husband or male relative vouching for them, keep their wages, and stay in the city even if work dried up temporarily. They could arrive in Washington with little more than a suitcase and still have a place to land. Going through the materials Sharpe and DeLorbe have pulled together, I found a Washington Post story from 1895 that noted “all of the girls in the house are bread winners.” The residents ranged from a dressmaker to a blind music teacher to an artist who retouched negatives in a photograph gallery—women who otherwise might have struggled to get a foothold in Washington. Excerpt from The Washington Post’s April 14, 1895 article “For Girls Who Work: A Good Christian Home Provided by Philanthropists.” Photo courtesy of ProQuest Historical Newspapers. “Doesn’t that just sound like Charles Dickens?” Despite the impact the dorm had on generations of Washington women, it once came dangerously close to disappearing altogether. In fact, if it weren’t for First Lady Lou Henry Hoover, TMH may have lost its property entirely.  Today, TMH calls 2nd St., NE, home—but for decades, it was located at 311 and 315 C St., NW. During the Great Depression, the city seized that property through eminent domain, and offered the dorm a mere tenth of its value. “Doesn’t that just sound like Charles Dickens?” DeLorbe says. “It’s the worst Depression anybody’s ever seen, and the District tries to evict all the girls from home.”  Old photograph of Young Woman’s Christian Home. Photograph by Emma Sullivan, courtesy of Thompson-Markward Hall. In response, the TMH board launched a publicity campaign, recruiting supporters to raise funds and attention. George M. Cohan, a huge Broadway star of the era, agreed to dedicate the opening night of his new play The Tavern at the National Theater as a benefit for the home—a move DeLorbe compares to a contemporary cause getting help from Taylor Swift. And the support didn’t stop with Cohan. The dorm’s cook wrote to Ava Long, the White House head housekeeper, asking Hoover to serve as a patroness for the event. On October 23, 1930, Hoover’s secretary Ruth Fesler responded: “As she very much hopes that she will be able to leave on that evening, and therefore able to occupy the box you so kindly offered her, she will not have any objection to having her name used as patroness,” Fesler wrote in the letter. “Mrs. Hoover never allows her name to be used as patroness unless she sees a possibility of attending the function.” Letter from Mrs.Hoover’s secretary to TMH. Photograph courtesy of Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Museum. It’s unclear whether Hoover actually attended, but the publicity and fundraising allowed the home to reopen at 235 2nd St., NE, in 1931. A few years later, Flora Thompson Markward donated a new south wing to serve as a convalescent home, and the dorm took on the name Thompson-Markward Hall. A short-lived experiment Fast-forward to 1974. Occupancy was down. The budget was tight. TMH’s superintendent had a solution, one that fit the shifting social mores of the era: invite the Jaycees’ young men, who were in town as congressional pages, to bunk in the dorm’s south wing.  Not everyone was thrilled about all-women’s dorms going co-ed. When the New York City Human Rights Commission ruled that sex-based discrimination applied to women-only hotels, even the Washingtonian weighed in—and apparently, the magazine wasn’t too impressed, writing in 1972 that: “I can’t believe it. I think there are still young women who prefer having a place to live where men are not allowed. If men have civil rights, we must have them too. Now only New York is affected, but these things have a way of snow-ball-ing.” Excerpt from The Sunday Star article “Feminine Citadels Threatened?” in 1972. While debates raged on paper, TMH’s co-ed experiment burned bright and fast. During the trial run, the men lit the sofa in the living room on fire—supposedly accidentally while smoking on the couch. “Everybody loves the couch on fire story,” Sharp says, noting that when TMH subsequently went back to all-women living, the blaze wasn’t the reason. Instead, the Jaycees just couldn’t afford housing anymore. For what it’s worth, TMH hasn’t welcomed men as residents since. A modern makeover For the first time in 94 years, TMH is getting a makeove—the better to ensure it can keep welcoming women for decades to come. “Put simply, the building was not built for modern convenience,” Sharp says. (Remember, Wi-Fi didn’t exist in the ’30s!). New furniture, refreshed rooms, a modern HVAC system, and the removal of the drop ceilings upstairs are all planned. Still, Sharp says she wants to “preserve this masterpiece of a building” wherever possible. The exterior will stay as is, thanks to city rules, and its beloved “Roosevelt doors”—where Eleanor Roosevelt once stood—will be carefully removed, stored, and later put back in place. A lot has changed since Roosevelt walked through those doors. Women can vote, open their own bank accounts, and live on their own without raising eyebrows. But the core idea behind the dorm hasn’t changed much. Nearly 90 years ago, she put words to what the home was really offering young women—not just a roof, but a sense of stability in a city that can feel overwhelming: “There are so many young people who are troubled by a feeling of insecurity, by the feeling that the world about them is changing,” she said. “I have always believed that if you can keep young people from developing a sense of bitterness in early life, they will go through life in a joyous spirit. In working with young people, there is something beyond bread and butter. There must be that feeling of security, and I know that a home like this must provide such a feeling.” In many ways, that’s still true. For women arriving today in DC on a tight timeline and a slim budget, TMH’s current $1,300 room and board can make the difference between taking an internship and having to pass on one. Mariana Cardenas, TMH’s Resident Services Manager, knows the problem all too well. “It’s happened many times while I’ve been working here where I’ll get these emails saying ‘I just got an internship and I start next week,’ ” Cardenas says. “These are some incredible opportunities, but then finding housing is just as hard. If women don’t have the option to stay with a relative that lives nearby or they don’t have the generational funds to afford a place in this very expensive city, they don’t have access to these opportunities to intern in these offices in DC.” Another reason TMH has endured as an all-women’s space, one of a few in the city? It’s safe, and in a different way than when it existed to protect women’s “virtue.” When my friend Charlotte Ehrlich was looking for short-term housing for her DC journalism residency, I told her about TMH. She felt an immediate sense of comfort. The dorm’s nickname, “the convent,” resonated with her—she’d attended a Catholic high school called Convent and Stuart Hall, and the dorm evoked not just familiarity but solitude and peace, a quiet oasis amid the chaos of Washington. “Do I think the rule of no boys past the first floor is old-fashioned? Yes,” Ehrlich says. “But at the end of the day, do I also feel safer living in a home of all women? 100 percent.” Ehrlich adds that TMH can feel like a sorority house, a place to meet women she wouldn’t normally encounter and hear their stories. It’s also a place to grow. Coming to Washington from a town of 7,000, I was wide-eyed when I first arrived. Previously, I’d never taken public transportation, flown on a plane, or commuted to work on my own—but during my three-month stay at TMH, I found the courage to make a bucket list of must-see tourist spots and “hidden gems” around the city.  Having graduated to living elsewhere in the area, I still miss the henna nights in the basement, movie nights in the living room, and the “meet you in the dining room at 10 am” texts from friends a floor above. I miss having a group of women I could ask anything about navigating DC. When I grab lunch with one of those friends on K Street now, it’s hard to believe we met at a dorm built in the 1800s to support women reeling from the Civil War. Only now, we’ve upgraded from dorm food to Chipotle.The post Inside the DC Women’s Dorm That Dates Back to the 19th Century—and Still Keeps Boys Off the Upper Floors first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less