The Gilded Age
In US history, the Gilded Age is described as the period from about the late 1870s to the late 1890s, between the Reconstruction Era and the Progressive Era.
Other sources broaden the time range, defining it as roughly 1870 to 1910; others define it as the days between the end of the American Civil War and the beginning of WWI.
The period takes its name from the novel, The Gilded Age (1873), written by Mark Twain in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner. The novel gives a vivid and accurate description of Washington, D.C., peopled with caricatures of many leading figures of the day, including greedy industrialists and corrupt politicians. Although the period was glittering on the surface, it was rotten and corrupt beneath.
And yet, many historians cite the Gilded Age as an important historical era because, in fact, it set the groundwork for the America of today.
Smithsonian—The Gilded Age and Today (2021)
The Gilded Age was a crucial era of industrialization and political turmoil that set the United States on the path to becoming the most economically powerful country in the world. Railroad construction connected the continent, newly invented skyscrapers rose in rapidly growing American cities. Expansive new factories needed unskilled workers, who arrived during the largest wave of immigration in American history. As a plethora of new, affordable, mass-produced products went from factory to consumer, it was a heady time of profits and progress. But there were also problems.
Many enterprising Americans benefited from the economic disruption of the time. Others were left behind, ill-equipped to compete in the new economy. The wealth gap between the rich and the poor was astronomical as industrial tycoons like the Rockefellers and the Carnegies built business empires and then used their power to depress wages and shut down competition. They bought politicians, corruptly tilting politics and the economy in their favor. Strikes and labor violence, protests and counter-protests bloodied the streets. Anarchist terrorists both foreign and domestic spread fear across the nation with waves of violence the government seemed helpless to prevent. One proposal: a ban on certain “dangerous” immigrant groups.
The Gilded Age
Reconstruction preceded the Gilded Age, when factories built as part of the North’s Civil War effort were converted to domestic manufacturing. Agriculture, which had once dominated the economy, was replaced by industry.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The Gilded Age marked the beginning of industrialization in America—a time of innovation, transportation growth, and full employment. It was also a time of economic devastation and dangerous working conditions for labor.
The Gilded Age was characterized by economic growth for the wealthy and extreme poverty for the working classes.
A societal shift from agriculture to industry resulted in a movement to the cities for some and westward migration for others.
The beginning of organized labor, investigative journalism, and progressive ideologies began to spell the end of the Gilded Age and its rigid class structure.
Economic and Industrial Developments
As the United States began to shift from agriculture to industry as a means of economic growth, people began to move from farms to urban areas. Railroads expanded, industry began to mechanize, communication improved, and corruption became widespread.
Railroad Expansion:
Railroads expanded dramatically in the U.S. in the 1870s. From 1871 to 1900, 170,000 miles of track were laid in the United States, most of it for constructing the transcontinental railway system. It began with the passage of the Pacific Railway Act in 1862, which authorized the first of five transcontinental railroads.
Mechanization of Industries
The late 19th century saw an unprecedented expansion of industry and production, much of it by machines. Machines replaced skilled workers, reducing labor costs and the ultimate selling price of goods and services. Instead of skilled workers seeing a product through from start to finish, jobs were often limited to one task repeated endlessly. The pace of work increased, with many laborers forced to work longer hours.
Economic and Industrial Developments
Communications Networks
Technological advancements, including the phonograph and the telephone, came into existence during the Gilded Age. So did the advent of mass-circulation newspapers and magazines. Professional entertainers quickly adopted these new forms of communication, making listening and reading news new leisure activities.
Monopolies and Robber Barons
During the Gilded Age, many businessmen became wealthy by gaining control of entire industries. Controlling an entire sector of the economy is known as a monopoly. The most prominent figures with monopolies were J.P. Morgan (banking), John D. Rockefeller (oil), Cornelius Vanderbilt (railroads), and Andrew Carnegie (steel).
Because of the way they exploited workers with low wages, long hours, and dangerous working conditions, these wealthy tycoons were often referred to as robber barons, a pejorative term used to describe the accumulation of wealth through that exploitation.
Economic and Industrial Developments
Rural Life and Urban Life—Gilded Age Homes
Homes during the Gilded Age reflected the lifestyle and wealth of the homeowner. While the wealthy built magnificent mansions with stately names like Vanderbilt Mansion, Peacock Point, and Castle Rock, many of the less fortunate lived in tenement buildings in cities, where they flocked for jobs, or in the West, in claim shanties—small shacks built to fulfill Homestead Act regulations.
The Gilded Age saw rapid growth in the economic disparities between workers and business owners. The wealthy lived lavishly, while the working class endured low wages and horrid conditions.
Real Wage Increases
The technological changes brought about by industrialization are thought to be largely responsible for the fact that real wages of unskilled labor grew 1.43% per year during the Gilded Age vs. 0.56% per year during the Progressive Era and just 0.44% per year from 1990 to 2005.
By those measures and comparisons, the Gilded Age would seem to be a success. In 1880, for example, the average earnings of an American worker were $347 per year. That grew to $445 in 1890, an increase of more than 28%.
Social Stratification and Inequality
Abject Poverty
“While the rich wore diamonds, many wore rags.” This summarizes the income and lifestyle disparity that characterized the Gilded Age. In 1890, 11 million of the nation’s 12 million families (92%) lived below the poverty line. Tenements teemed with an unlikely combination of rural families and immigrants who came into urban areas, took low-paying jobs, and lived in abject poverty.
Though wages rose during the Gilded Age, they were deficient initially. As noted above, in 1880, the average wages of an American worker were $347 per year ($10,399 today, as of this writing) but had risen to $445 by 1890 ($14,949 in today’s dollars).
Given today’s federal poverty level (FPL), which is $30,000 for a family of four, most Gilded Age Americans were excessively poor despite the impressive wage growth of the time.
Social Stratification and Inequality
Labor Unions
The rise of labor unions was neither sudden nor without struggle. Business owners used intimidation and violence to suppress workers, even though they had a right to organize.
By 1866, there were nearly 200,000 workers in local unions across the United States. William Sylvis took advantage of these numbers to establish the first nationwide labor organization, named the National Labor Union (NLU).
Unfortunately, Sylvis and the NLU tried to represent too many constituencies, causing the group to disband following the Panic of 1873 when it couldn’t serve all those competing groups. The NLU was replaced by the Knights of Labor, started by Uriah Stephens in 1869. Stephens admitted all wage earners, including women and Black people.
The Knights of Labor lost members and eventually dissolved for two reasons. First, Stephens, an old-style industrial capitalist, refused to adjust to the changing needs of workers. Second, a bomb thrown into a crowd at a rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square on May 4, 1886, was blamed on the union, driving even more members away.
By December 1886, labor leader Samuel Gompers took advantage of the vacuum left by the demise of the Knights and created a new union based on the simple premise that American workers wanted just two things: higher wages and better working conditions. Thus was born the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
Social Stratification and Inequality
Corruption and Scandals—Muckrakers
Another product of the Gilded Age was investigative journalism. Reporters who exposed corruption among politicians in the wealthy class were known as muckrakers for their ability to dig through the “muck” of the Gilded Age to uncover scandal and thievery.
Notable muckrakers included Jacob Riis, who in 1890 exposed the horrors of New York City slum life. In 1902, Lincoln Steffens brought city corruption to light with a magazine article titled “Tweed Days in St. Louis.” Ida Tarbell put her energy into exposing the antics of John D. Rockefeller; her reporting led to the breakup of Standard Oil Co. In 1906, Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle to expose conditions in the meatpacking industry. This led to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.
Immigration
Many immigrants came to North America during the Gilded Age, with 11.7 million of them landing in the United States. Of those, 10.6 million came from Europe, making up 90% of the immigrant population. Immigrants made it possible for the U.S. economy to grow since they were willing to take jobs that native-born Americans wouldn’t.
While factory owners welcomed these newcomers, who were willing to accept low wages and dangerous working conditions, not all Americans did. So-called nativists lobbied to restrict certain immigrant populations, and in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act passed Congress.
But millions came despite the obstacles. The Statue of Liberty beckoned, and the “huddled masses” responded. The children of immigrants began to assimilate, despite their parents’ objections.
Another hallmark of the Gilded Age was born, as America became a true melting pot.
Women in the Workforce
Industrialization created jobs outside the home for women. By 1900, one in seven women were employed. The typical female worker was young, urban, single, and either an immigrant or the daughter of immigrants. Her work was temporary—just until she married. The job she was most likely to hold was that of a domestic servant.
The Gilded Age also saw an increase in college-educated women. Colleges, including Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, and Mount Holyoke, opened their doors to women in the post-bellum years. This did not happen without some incredible chauvinism. Scientists of the era warned that women’s brains were too small to handle college work without compromising their reproductive systems. Many, it turned out, took that risk. The predominant fields held by female college graduates were nursing and teaching.
The Black Experience
As reconstruction ended on a state-by-state basis, Black people could migrate away from plantations and into cities in search of economic opportunity, or to move west or south in search of land that they could work for themselves. From 1870 to 1900, the South’s Black population went from 4.4 million to 7.9 million. People found jobs in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas, working on railroads and in mines, lumber, factories, and farms.
For some, however, sharecropping replaced slavery, keeping Black workers tied to the land without ownership.
For a small set of others, this period led to the foundation of what’s known as the Black elite or “the colored aristocracy.” Among this group were members such as Blanche Bruce, a Republican senator from Mississippi; Josephine Beall Willson Bruce, a women’s rights activist in Washington, D.C., and Timothy Thomas Fortune, economist and editor of The New York Age, the nation’s leading Black newspaper at the time.
Economic Impact and Legacy
The Gilded Age saw the transformation of the American economy from agrarian to industrial.
It saw the development of a national transportation and communication network.
Women began to enter the workforce as never before.
Millions of immigrants took root in a new land.
Enterprising industrialists became titans and wealthy beyond measure.
Production and per capita income rose sharply, albeit with great disparity among wealth classes. Earlier legislation, like the Homestead Act, motivated the movement westward of millions of people to lay claim to land that would give them a new start and a chance at the American dream.
As America became more prosperous, some of its citizens fell victim to greed, corruption, and political vice. This combination of extraordinary wealth and unimaginable poverty was the ultimate juxtaposition of capitalism and government intervention. The debate continues today.
What Was the Worst Scandal of the Gilded Age?
The Gilded Age gave birth to enough scandals to create competition for the worst of the lot, but many historians agree that the transcontinental railroad scandal was the cream of the crop, so to speak.
The federal government, in deciding to underwrite a transcontinental railroad, created an opportunity for corruption that it did not anticipate. As builder of the railroad, the Union Pacific company engaged in price fixing and bribery that affected members of the Ulysses S. Grant presidential administration. The corruption was uncovered by investigators, bringing the scheme to an end.
The Bottom Line
The Gilded Age was critical to the growth of the United States by introducing industrialization and technological advances. It was also a time of political turmoil, greed, and extreme income inequality. The U.S. became the most economically powerful country in the world during this era. It was a time of unprecedented progress and unimaginable poverty.
The wealth gap between the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Morgans, and Vanderbilts and the rest of the country was palpable. With wealth came greed. With innovation came corruption. Muckrakers, the first investigative journalists, helped uncover the graft, and unions helped labor even the playing field. Ultimately, this “best and worst” of times became another important chapter in the American saga.
Video
The Gilded Age: American Experience, PBS
Women in the Gilded Age
Women in Industrializing America
Industrialization was the defining context of the Gilded Age. And it also re-cast the thinking that defined a woman's "separate sphere" and shaped the urban experience of migrants and immigrants. During this period, women's political campaigns, above all the push for women's rights begun in 1848, gathered adherents and credibility. The breakdown of women's separate sphere, the increasing numbers of women in the labor force, and the westward movement affected the lives of middle and working-class women. Many important trends evident during the Gilded Age presaged the emergence of the "new woman" of the Progressive Era.
The "typical" woman of the Gilded Age was white, middle class (broadly defined), Protestant, native born, married, and living in a small town. She was likely to be better educated than her mother and also likely to have fewer children.
The received wisdom about her sexuality saw her as "passionless," and the patriarchal society gave her little active control over her medical health or reproductive system. She was assumed, and she agreed, to be morally superior to her husband and closer to God. Her husband as likely as not worked away from the home.
Women in Industrializing America
She rarely stepped into the public sphere, confining her daily actions to the home. If she was among the small but increasing number of women who did move into public life, she did so within the supportive context of church-related or secular women's associations. Her causes ranged from the bold demand for suffrage to the popular temperance crusade, with myriad reforms in between.
If she was a member of a woman's club, her children were probably grown or she had servants or she was unmarried or widowed. Her late nineteenth century ideas about women and men were based on the "asexual nature of women and their concomitant moral superiority." This dual ideology, stressing gender differences, fueled growing feminist demands among middle-class women, both white and black.
On the one hand, the social dictates of the cult of true womanhood put men and women in conflicting roles and defined the normal female life as one lived at home as a wife and mother in the company of women friends leading similar lives.
On the other hand, they provided a safe, secure, and empowering space from which women could set forth to ameliorate society's ills. Nursing the spiritual and physical health of her immediate family had its analogy in serving the needs of strangers.
Women in Industrializing America
Of course, these accepted notions of women in the nineteenth century applied most forcefully to white, middle-class women. Whether or not the notion trickled down to the working class or gained currency in all ethnic and racial communities is debatable. Even as the Gilded Age dawned, the idea of the "true woman" in her separate sphere was belied by increasing numbers of working women and those white and black middle-class women who were venturing out of the home and into the political realm.
Ironically, industrialization provided the impetus both for the creation of the separate sphere and for the effort by middle-class women to break out of it.
Industrialization changed the way women worked within the home, supplying time-saving domestic appliances and often giving them greater leisure. It also created jobs outside the home for more and more women. By the turn of the century, one in seven women was employed. Most were single and fending for themselves. Some married women worked to supplement their husbands' incomes.
The industrial work force dwelt in cities, and the squalor, disease, and wretched living conditions among the working poor created many social ills that middle-class women determined they should try to correct. They formed clubs, associations.
Women in Industrializing America
These separate female institutions boosted women's self-esteem, turned them into expert parliamentarians, introduced them to a wider world, put them at their ease in public places, and provided them with invigorating and supportive circles of friends and coworkers. For many women, club work became their career.
In the Gilded Age, sometimes called the nadir for African Americans, middle-class black women labored in a racist society that denied them access to politics, the legal system, and governmental support. Because they were accustomed to depending upon their own initiative, it is possible that a larger percentage of black women engaged in associational work more frequently than did white women." Like their white counterparts, black women had been organizing benevolent societies, often church-related, since the colonial era, and the acceleration of industrialization with its accompanying social ills generated more associations.
Women in Industrializing America
Another important result of women's participation in voluntary associations was their heightened political acumen. Women learned to voice their demands in front of hostile audiences and to articulate critical rebuttals. Women in associations governed themselves, kept minutes, elected officers, presided over meetings, wrote out platforms, managed finances, and lobbied male politicians.
Speaking about the seven years her club spent in preparation and study before tackling the prevailing social problems, the president of the Chicago Women's Club believed that "no one acquainted with the difficulty of managing large interests by means of a body of untrained women, without business habits or parliamentary experience, can feel that these years of preparation and education were wasted. It is my firm conviction that without this preliminary training we should never have attained that steadiness of purpose and that broad habit of looking at all sides of a question which has made us a power in the community."
They gained a sense of pride and increased self-esteem, even as they pushed against the behavioral codes that mainstream society prescribed for them.
Women in the Gilded Age, Alan Brinkley
Women and Children at Work
[As the great mass-production industries of the Gilded Age rose to prominence,] the decreasing need for skilled work in factories induced many employers to increase the use of women and children, whom they could hire for lower wages than adult males.
By 1900, women made up 17 percent of the industrial work force, a fourfold increase since 1870; and 20 percent of all women (well over 5 million) were wage earners. Some of these working women were single and took jobs to support themselves or their parents or siblings.
Many others were married and had to work to supplement the inadequate earnings of their husbands; for many working-class families, two incomes were required to support even a minimal standard of living.
In earlier periods of American history, women had regularly worked within the household economies that characterized most all American families. But when women began working in factories in the mid-nineteenth century—outside the household, independently of husbands or fathers—many people began to consider their presence in the work force a social problem.
Women in the Gilded Age, Alan Brinkley
Women and Children at Work
Partly this was because many reformers, including many females, saw women as particularly vulnerable to exploitation and injury in the rough environment of the factory. It was also because many people considered it inappropriate for women to work independently. And so the “problem” of women in the work force became a significant public issue. In some communities the aversion to seeing married women work was so strong—among both men and women—that families struggled on inadequate wages rather than see a wife and mother take a job.
Women industrial workers were overwhelmingly white and mostly young, 75 percent of them under 25. The vast majority were immigrants or the daughters of immigrants. There were women in all industries, even in some of the most arduous jobs. Most women, however, worked in a few industries where unskilled and semiskilled machine labor (as opposed to heavy manual labor) prevailed.
The textile industry remained the largest single industrial employer of women. (Domestic service remained the most common female occupation overall.)
Women in the Gilded Age, Alan Brinkley
Women worked for wages as low as $6 to $8 a week, well below the minimum necessary for survival (and well below the wages paid to men working the same jobs).
At the turn of the century, the average annual wage for a male industrial worker was $597; for a woman, it was $314. Even highly skilled women workers made about half what men doing the same job earned.
Advocates of a minimum wage law for women created a sensation when they brought several women to a hearing in Chicago to testify that low wages and desperate poverty had driven them to prostitution. (The testimony was not, however, sensational enough for the Illinois legislature, which promptly defeated the bill. )
At least 1.7 million children under 16 were employed in factories and fields in 1900, more than twice the number of 30 years before. Ten percent of all girls age 10 to 15, and 20 percent of all boys, held jobs. This was partly because some families so desperately needed additional wages that parents and children alike were pressed into service. It was also because in some families the reluctance to permit wives to work led parents to send their children into the work force to avoid forcing mothers to do so.
Women in the Gilded Age, Alan Brinkley
This did not, however, prevent reformers from seeing children working in factories as a significant social problem. Under the pressure of outraged public opinion, 38 state legislatures passed child labor laws in the late nineteenth century; but these laws were of limited impact.
Sixty percent of child workers were employed in agriculture, which was typically exempt from the laws; such children often worked 12-hour days picking or hoeing in the fields.
And even for children employed in factories, the laws merely set a minimum age of 12 years and a maximum workday of 10 hours, standards that employers often ignored in any case.
In the cotton mills of the South, children working at the looms all night were kept awake by having cold water thrown in their faces. In canneries, little girls cut fruits and vegetables sixteen hours a day.
Exhausted children were particularly susceptible to injury while working at dangerous machines, and they were maimed and even killed in industrial accidents at an alarming rate. . . .
Women in the Gilded Age, Alan Brinkley
One of the great problems of [the] precipitous growth [of American cities in the late nineteenth century] was finding housing for the thousands of new residents who were pouring into the cities every day.
For the prosperous, however, housing was seldom a worry. The availability of cheap labor and the increasing accessibility of tools and materials reduced the cost of building in the late nineteenth century and let anyone with even a moderate income afford a house.
Many of the richest urban residents lived in palatial mansions in the heart of the city and created lavish “fashionable districts”—Fifth Avenue in New York, Back Bay and Beacon Hill in Boston, Society Hill in Philadelphia, Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, Nob Hill in San Francisco, and many others.
Most urban residents, however, could not afford either to own a house in the city or to move to the suburbs. Instead, they stayed in the city centers and rented. Because demand was so high and space so scarce, they had little bargaining power in the process. Landlords tried to squeeze as many rent-paying residents as possible into the smallest available space.
Women in the Gilded Age, Alan Brinkley
In Manhattan, for example, the average population density in 1894 was 143 people per acre—a higher rate than that of the most crowded cities of Europe (Paris had 127 per acre, Berlin 101) and far higher than in any other American city then or since.
In some neighborhoods—the lower East Side, for example—density was more than 700 people per acre, among the highest level in the world. Landlords were reluctant to invest much in immigrant housing, confident they could rent dwellings for a profit regardless of their conditions.
In the cities of the South—Charleston, New Orleans, Richmond—poor blacks lived in crumbling former slave quarters. In Boston, they moved into cheap three-story wooden houses (“triple deckers”), many of them decaying fire hazards. In Baltimore and Philadelphia, they crowded into narrow brick row houses. And in New York, as in many other cities, more than a million people lived in tenements.
Women in the Gilded Age, Alan Brinkley
The word “tenement” originally referred simply to a multiple-family rental building, but by the late nineteenth century it was used to describe slum dwellings only. The first tenements, built in New York City in 1850, had been hailed as a great improvement in housing for the poor. . . . But tenements . . . soon became “miserable abodes,” with many windowless rooms, little or no plumbing or central heating, and perhaps a row of privies in the basement.
A New York state law of 1870 required a window in every bedroom of tenements built after that date; developers complied by adding small, sunless air shafts to their buildings. Most of all, tenements were incredibly crowded, with three, four, and, sometimes, many more people crammed into each small room.
The Rise of Mass Consumption, Brinkley
For urban middle-class Americans in the last decades of the 19th century, a distinctive middle-class culture began to exert a powerful influence over American life. Much of the rest of American society—the majority of the population, which was neither urban nor middle class—advanced less rapidly or not at all; but almost no one was unaffected by the rise of a new urban, consumer culture.
American industry could not have grown as it did without the expansion of markets for the goods it produced. The growth of demand occurred at almost all levels of society, a result not just of the new techniques of production and mass distribution that were making consumer goods less expensive, but also of rising incomes.
Incomes in the industrial era were rising for almost everyone, although at highly uneven rates. While the most conspicuous result of the new economy was the creation of vast fortunes, more important for society as a whole was the growth and increasing prosperity of the middle class.
The salaries of clerks, accountants, middle managers, and other “white collar” workers rose on average by a third between 1890 and 1910—and in some parts of the middle class salaries rose by much more. Doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, for example, experienced a particularly dramatic increase in both the prestige and the profitability of their professions.
The Rise of Mass Consumption, Brinkley
Working-class incomes rose too in those years, although from a much lower base and considerably more slowly. Iron and steel workers, despite the setbacks their unions suffered, saw their hourly wages increase by a third between 1890 and 1910; but industries with large female, African-American, or Mexican work forces—shoes, textiles, paper, laundries, many areas of commercial agriculture—saw very small increases, as did almost all industries in the South.
Still, some workers in these industries experienced a rise in family income because women and children often worked to supplement the husband’s and father’s earnings, or because families took in boarders or laundry or otherwise supplemented their incomes.
Also important to the new mass market was the development of affordable products and the creation of new merchandising techniques, which made many consumer goods available to a broad market for the first time. A good example of such changes was the emergence of ready-made clothing. Interest in women’s fashion, for example, had once been a luxury reserved for the relatively affluent. Now middle-class and even working-class women could strive to develop a distinctive style of dress. Substantial wardrobes, once a luxury reserved for the wealthy, began to become common at other levels of society as well. New homes, even relatively modest ones, now included clothes closets. Even people in remote rural areas could develop more stylish wardrobes by ordering from the new mail-order houses (Sears catalogs).
The Rise of Mass Consumption, Brinkley
Department Stores
In larger cities, department stores (which had appeared earlier in Europe) helped transform buying habits and turn shopping into a more glamorous activity. Marshall Field in Chicago created one of the first American department stores, and others soon followed: Macy’s in New York, Abraham and Straus in Brooklyn, Jordan Marsh and Filene’s in Boston, Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia.
The department stores transformed the concept of shopping.
First, they brought together under one roof an enormous array of products previously sold in separate shops.
Second, they created an atmosphere that made shopping glamorous. The new stores were elaborately decorated to suggest luxury and elegance. They included restaurants and comfortable lounges to make shopping a social event as well as a practical necessity. They were especially important as public spaces in which women could interact respectably as both customers and salesclerks. Well-dressed sales clerks, mostly women, provided attentive service to customers.
Third, department stores—like mail-order houses—took advantage of economies of scale to sell merchandise at lower prices than many of the individual shops with which they competed.
The Rise of Mass Consumption, Brinkley
Women as Consumers
The rise of mass consumption had particularly dramatic effects on American women, who were generally the primary consumers within families. Women’s clothing styles changed much more rapidly and dramatically than men’s, which encouraged more frequent purchases.
Women generally bought and prepared food for their families, so the availability of new food products changed not only the way everyone ate, but also the way women shopped and cooked.
The consumer economy produced new employment opportunities for women as sales clerks in department stores and as waitresses in the rapidly proliferating restaurants.
And it spawned a new movement in which women played a vital role: the consumer protection movement. The National Consumers League, formed in the 1890s under the leadership of Florence Kelley, attempted to mobilize the power of women as consumers to force retailers and manufacturers to improve wages and working conditions for women workers. By defining themselves as consumers, many middle-class women were able to find a stance from which they could become active participants in public life.
Indeed, the mobilization of women behind consumer causes—and eventually many other causes—was one of the most important political developments of the late nineteenth century.
Toward Universal Schooling
A society coming to depend increasingly on specialized skills and scientific knowledge was, of course, a society with a high demand for education. The late nineteenth century, therefore, was a time of rapid expansion and reform of American schools and universities.
One example was the spread of free public primary and secondary education. In 1860, there were only 100 public high schools in the entire United States. By 1900, the number had reached 6,000 and by 1914 over 12,000.
By 1900, compulsory school attendance laws were in effect in 31 states and territories, but education was still far from universal. Rural areas lagged far behind urban-industrial ones in funding public education. And in the South, many blacks had no access to schools.
Colleges and universities also proliferated rapidly in the late 19th century. They benefited particularly from the Morrill Land Grant Act of the Civil War era, by which the federal government donated land to states for the establishment of colleges. After 1865, states in the South and West took particular advantage of the law. In all, sixty-nine “land-grant” institutions were established in the last decades of the century—among them the state university systems of California, Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. UD is one of the original 52 land-grant universities, founded in 1743 and chartered by the state in 1833.
Toward Universal Schooling
Other universities benefited from millions of dollars contributed by business and financial tycoons. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and others gave generously to such schools as Columbia, the University of Chicago, Harvard, Northwestern, Princeton, Syracuse, and Yale. Other philanthropists founded new universities or reorganized and renamed older ones to perpetuate their family names—Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Duke, Tulane, and Stanford.
The post-Civil War era saw, too, an important expansion of educational opportunities for women, although such opportunities continued to lag far behind those available to men and were almost always denied to black women.
Women and Education, Brinkley
Most public high schools accepted women readily, but opportunities for higher education were few. At the end of the Civil War, only three American colleges were coeducational. In the years after the war, many of the land-grant colleges and universities in the Middle West and such private universities as Cornell and Wesleyan began to admit women along with men.
But coeducation played a less crucial role in the education of women in this period than the creation of a network of women’s colleges. Mount Holyoke, which had begun its life in 1836 as a “seminary” for women, became a full-fledged college in the 1880s. At about the same time, entirely new female institutions were emerging: Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Wells, and Goucher.
A few of the larger private universities created separate colleges for women on their campuses (Barnard at Columbia and Radcliffe at Harvard, for example). Proponents of women’s colleges saw the institutions as places where female students would not be treated as “second-class citizens” by predominantly male student bodies and faculties.
In 1872, the UD Board of Trustees approved the admission of women, but the plan was abandoned after a year because of low applicant numbers. In 1914, the Women's College opened with 58 students.
Literature in the Gilded Age
The Literature of Urban America, Brinkley
Some writers and artists—the local-color writers of the South, for example, responded to the new industrial civilization by evoking an older, more natural world, such as Mark Twain, in Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.
Theodore Dreiser was another American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice and agency. Dreiser's best known novels include Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925).
But others grappled directly with the new order, in an effort to re-create urban social reality, one of the strongest impulses in late 19th and early 20th century American literature.
This trend toward realism found an early voice in Stephen Crane, best known for The Red Badge of Courage (1895), a Civil War novel. But earlier, in 1893, he authored a powerful indictment of the plight of the working class in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a grim picture of urban poverty and slum life.
Socialist writer Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1906, a novel designed to reveal the depravity of capitalism.
The Literature of Urban America, Brinkley
And southern writer Kate Chopin, recently re-discovered, explored the oppressive features of traditional marriage after publication of her shocking novel The Awakening in 1899. It described a young wife and mother who abandoned her family in search of personal fulfillment. She received considerable personal abuse and the novel was widely banned.
Henry James, who lived most of his adult life in England and Europe, produced a series of coldly realistic novels—The Americans (1877), Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Ambassadors (1903), and others. He was ambivalent about the character of modern, industrial civilization—and about American civilization in particular.
The growing popularity of literature helped spawn a remarkable network of clubs, mostly formed and populated by women, to bring readers together to talk about books. Reading clubs proliferated rapidly in cities and even small towns, among African-American as well as white women. They made literature a social experience for hundreds of thousands of women and created a tradition that has continued into the twenty-first century.
American Heiresses of the Gilded Age
The Gilded Age included dynamics that had never been seen before in American society. The combination of enormous amounts of new wealth and rapid industrial advancements created a brand new way of life for many families. One of these new ways of life was an international lifestyle and more American families living a life of leisure than ever before. Some such families liked to emulate what they saw as the pinnacle of this way of life, European royalty. It would only be a matter of time before some families, emboldened by the new possibilities that such wealth provided, would seek to make royal status a reality. The result was dozens and dozens of American heiresses gaining titles and noble status across the pond. It is believed that by the 1930s, 350 American women had married into noble European families bringing with them over one billion dollars.
These women left stories to be told. Let’s take a look at three American Heiresses of the Gilded Age: Minnie Stevens, Consuelo Vanderbilt, and Jennie Spencer-Churchill.
American Heiresses of the Gilded Age
Mary Stevens, Lady Paget
Mary Stevens was born in 1865, to father Paran and mother Marietta. The sources I have found say that Marietta was both ambitious and idiosyncratic, and was a bit much for New York society. Europe would quickly come calling as Mary reached her teenage years. The stories of the American Heiresses are closely woven with the stories of their mothers. In Mary’s case, t was a matter of overcoming her mother’s poor judgment along the way.
As the two became more known in European society Marietta set her sights on a title for Mary. The big problem was that the tactic she used was overinflating the value of Mary’s dowry and the family’s wealth. After turning down multiple proposals Marietta agreed to the marriage between Mary and a French duke.
But when the duke sent someone to investigate the family situation back in the states, the cover was up and the engagement was called off. Luckily for Mary, she had more going for her than wealth and her plotting mother, she had charm and an established reputation. The Prince of Wales gave her an endorsement and she ended up with Captain Arthur Paget, grandson of the 1st Marquess of Anglesey, becoming Lady Paget. The two would remain living in Europe and would have four children together.
American Heiresses of the Gilded Age
Consuelo Vanderbilt
Daughter of railroad millionaires William Kissam Vanderbilt and Alva Erskine Smith, Consuelo, was a highly sought-after beauty with all the attributes of the perfect American wife to European royalty. She was educated, multilingual, refined, and had a dowry worth 75 million in today’s money.
She was also hopelessly at the mercy of her scheming mother. When Alva took Lady Paget’s suggestion of marrying Consuelo to Charles Spencer-Churchill, she couldn’t be convinced otherwise, no matter how unhappy the couple was with each other. The two wed in 1895.
Although Consuelo became extremely popular with the residents of her husband’s estate, it was a miserable match with both husband and wife soon straying. Remarkably, when the couple permanently split in 1921 they were able to be granted an annulment based on Alva’s testimony that she had forced the marriage upon Consuelo. By this time the pair had two sons, cousins to Winston Churchill himself.
Luckily, Consuelo was able to find love after her marriage to Charles fell apart. She married the extraordinarily well-connected Frenchman Jacques Balsan who had been one of Coco Channel’s lovers and was friends with the Wright Brothers. He was also a wealthy heir and the two would go on to enjoy a fancy high-class life together.
American Heiresses of the Gilded Age
Jeanette ‘Jennie’ Jerome
Mother of Winston Churchill, she was also one of the most well-known of the Gilded Age American heiresses who married into English royalty.
Daughter of Leonard and Clara Jerome, Jennie was "new money." Leonard was a self-made millionaire who had earned his position in the stock market. But he had a "wandering eye" and the family was not accepted among the more established elite, so Clara and her daughters moved to Europe in the 1870s to enjoy all of the luxuries that those born into the highest ranks of society could imagine.
Jennie was a vivacious and independent woman. Despite marrying Lord Randolph Churchill in 1874 after a whirlwind romance, she continued to take lovers, including being the long-time mistress of King Edward VII.
Other rumors about this American heiress include that she had hundreds of lovers, that Lord Randolph died of syphilis, and that she was an absent mother. These persisting tall tales were largely disproven in the family memoir written by some Churchill descendants: The Churchills: A Family Portrait.
American Heiresses of the Gilded Age
Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor, Mrs. Astor, was a socialite who led New York's high society, known as the "Four Hundred," during the Gilded Age.
She was the wife of William Backhouse Astor Jr., a real estate and railroad investor, and the matriarch of the American Astors. She was known for her taste for old families, servants, operas, lace, and friends. She hosted teas, receptions, late-night dinners, and an annual ball at her Fifth Avenue mansion
Her husband's family, the Astors, had made a fortune initially through the fur trade, and later through investing in New York City real estate. Despite the wealth of the Astor family, Lina had the superior pedigree as a member of an old Knickerbocker (original 1600s Dutch settlers of Manhattan) family.
American Heiresses of the Gilded Age
In the decades following the Civil War, the population of New York City grew almost exponentially, with immigrants and the "new money" families from the Midwest; they began to challenge the dominance of the old New York Establishment. Mrs. Astor attempted to codify proper behavior and etiquette, to determine who was acceptable among the new arrivals.
The Astors were the champions of old money and tradition. They claimed that among the vastly rich families of Gilded Age New York, only 400 people could be counted as members of Fashionable Society, also the limitation of her NYC ballroom.
Lina was the foremost authority on the "Aristocracy" of New York in the late nineteenth century. She held ornate and elaborate parties for herself and other members of the elite New York socialite crowd. None was permitted to attend these gatherings without an official calling card from her. Lina's social groups were dominated by strong-willed "aristocratic" women. These social gatherings were dependent on overly conspicuous luxury and publicity. More so than the gatherings themselves, importance was highly placed upon the group as the upper-crust of New York's elite. She and her ladies therefore represented the "Aristocratic," or the Old Money, whereas the newly wealthy Vanderbilt family would establish a new wave of New Money.
Next Week:
Discussion of The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton