National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

The Gilded Age and Country Places
Scholarship on American women's history for the Gilded Age and Progressive Era takes
many directions and several are important for understanding the women in the Vanderbilt
story. 33 The end of the nineteenth century were transformative years when more women earned
college degrees, found professional employment, and entered the workforce in factories, stores,
and offices. This resulted in not only generational differences between women who had been
raised in the "women's sphere," and those whose life experiences had been shaped by the public
sphere, but also a higher profile of women engaged in activism and the woman movement. 34
This young generation of middle- and upper-class college-trained women turned to
humanitarian reform, including founding settlement houses in desperate neighborhoods in
cities such as Chicago and New York or agitating for government intervention on behalf of
mothers and children. 35 In addition, many women continued to fight for woman suffrage, a
cause that attracted militant elite women as well. For example, the Equal Franchise Society was
an exclusive suffrage group that included society members such as Mrs. William Vanderbilt,
Alva Belmont, Florence Harriman, and Katherine Mackey who lent their fortunes and their
status to the movement. 36
While labor histories focus primarily on factory workers, there are several books that
specifically look at domestic service. Teresa Amott and Julie A. Matthaei trace the decline of
numbers of women working in domestic service beginning in the late nineteenth century as
other employment opportunities offered women higher wages. Daniel Sutherland also
attributes this decline to new household technologies that both promised to relieve the drudgery
of housework as well as replace the need for full complements of servants. 37 Two excellent
monographs on the history of domestic service include David Katzman's pioneering Seven Days
a Week (1978) and Faye E. Dudden's Serving Women (1983). Dudden looks at nineteenthcentury
domestics and posits a shift from "help" to "domestics," a change that resulted from the
forces of industrialization and urbanization. One source that could prove particularly useful for
33 General texts on American women's history include Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of
Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1997); Linda K. Kerber and Jane Sherron DeHart, eds.,
Women's America, Refocusing the Past, 4 th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Gerda Lerner,
The Majority Finds Its Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Caroll Smith-Rosenberg,
Disorderly Conduct, Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985);
and Nancy Woloch, Women and the American Experience (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1984). A good
multicultural reader is Ellen DuBois and Vicki Ruiz, eds., Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in
American Women's History, 3 rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999).
34 Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 22.
35 See Lynn D. Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1900); Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991); Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1995); and Linda Gordon, Pitied but not Entitled, Single Mothers and the History of
Welfare, 1890-1935 (New York: Free Press, 1994).
36 Ellen Carol DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1997), 106-15. See also, Susan E. Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood, Gender and Class in the
Campaign Against Woman Suffrage (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997); Margaret Finnegan,
Selling Suffrage, Consumer Culture and Votes for Women (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999);
and Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-1920 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1965).
37 Teresa L. Amott and Julie A. Matthaei, Race, Gender and Work, A Multicultural Economic History of
Women in the United States, rev. ed. (Boston: South End Press, 1996); Daniel E. Sutherland, "Modernizing
Domestic Service," in American Home Life, 1880-1930, A Social History of Spaces and Services, eds. Jessica
H. Foy and Thomas J. Schlereth (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992).
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