National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

The Gilded Age and Country Places
this study might be Lucy Maynard Salmon's Domestic Service, written in 1890. 38 The drawback
of these works is that by focusing on women's work, they neglect the male house staff at places
such as the Vanderbilts' estate.
Turning from the history of women to that of men affords the opportunity to look at the
new work on masculinity. Several authors point to a crisis in masculinity that emerged as a
result of changing economic, political, and family structures. Historian Michael Kimmel notes
in Manhood in America that the combination of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration
had "created a new sense of an oppressively crowded, depersonalized, and often emasculated
life." 39 This resulted in men turning to movements such as "Muscular Christianity," bodybuilding,
organized sport, fraternal organizations, and activities that recreated "primitive"
passions that might be found through hunting, Indian ceremonies, or exploration. 40 As Gail
Bederman points out, the men most likely to develop neurasthenia, a Victorian nervous disease,
were "middle- and upper-class businessmen and professionals whose highly evolved bodies had
been weakened by advances in civilization." 41 Athletics in particular offered a way to build body
and character. Sport served as a common metaphor for "real" life, fair play and commitment
being equally important in both the games of play and the game of life. 42
Another area of historical inquiry that offers context for Hyde Park is the work on
consumer culture. Recent histories trace America's market and consumer values to the
eighteenth century. 43 Yet the maturation of transportation, communication, and energy
networks, the availability of mass-produced goods, the establishment of advertising and national
marketing strategies, and the rise of a professional class of managers all signaled an acceleration
of consumption patterns and a shift in values from producer to consumer ethics during the last
two decades of the nineteenth century. 44 While elite consumption habits differed in scale and
38
David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week, Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women, Household Service in Nineteenth-
Century America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983); Lucy Maynard Salmon, Domestic
Service (New York: Macmillan, 1890). See also Daniel Sutherland, Americans and Their Servants:
Domestic Service in the United States from 1800 to 1920 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1981).
39
Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America, A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 83.
40
E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood, Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the
Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 222-46. See also, T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace,
Antimodernism and Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1983), 47-58; Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1989); and Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen, eds., Meanings for Manhood,
Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Steven A.
Riess, City Games, the Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1989).
41
Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States,
1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 87.
42
Rotundo, 242-3.
43
See Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude, eds. The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation,
Essays in the Social History of Rural America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985);
Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); and Cary
Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds., Of Consuming Interests, The Style of Life in the
Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994).
44
See T.J. Jackson Lears, "From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and Therapeutic Roots of the
Consumer Culture, 1880-1930," in Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears, eds. The Culture of
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