Industrialization and new consumer practices created foundations for modern American culture. While middle-class families sought to preserve the Victorian domestic ideal, a variety of factors transformed family life. Families had fewer children, and a substantial majority of young people achieved more education than their parents had obtained. Across class and gender lines, Americans enjoyed athletics and the outdoors, fostering the rise of environmentalism.

Among an array of women’s reform movements, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union sought prohibition of liquor, but it also addressed issues such as domestic violence, poverty, and education. Members of women’s clubs pursued a variety of social and economic reforms, while other women organized for race uplift and patriotic work. Gradually, the Victorian ideal of female moral superiority gave way to modern claims for women’s equal rights.

New intellectual currents, including Darwinism, challenged Victorian certainties. In the arts, realist and naturalist writers rejected both romanticism and Vic–torian domesticity. Many Americans were shocked by the results, including Theodore Dreiser’s scandalous novel Sister Carrie, Mark Twain’s rejection of Christian faith, and the boldly modernist paintings displayed at New York’s Armory Show. Science and modernism did not, however, displace religion. Newly arrived Catholics and Jews, as well as old-line Protestants, adapted their faith to the conditions of modern life. Foreign missions, in the meantime, spread the Christian gospel around the world, with mixed results for those receiving the message.