Changing Gender Roles
Middle-class wives generally remained at home, caring for the house and children, often with the aid of a servant. Whereas in the past farmers and artisans had worked from the home, now most men and women accepted as natural the separation of the workplace and the home caused by industrialization and urbanization. Although the birthrate and marriage rates among the middle class dropped during the late nineteenth century, wives were still expected to care for their husbands and family first to fulfill their feminine duties. Even though daughters increasingly attended colleges reserved for women, such as Smith, Radcliffe, Wellesley, and Mount Holyoke, their families viewed education as a means of providing refinement rather than a career. One physician aptly summed up the prevailing view that women could only use their brains “but little and in trivial matters” and should concentrate on serving as “the companion or ornamental appendage to man.”
Middle-class women were now confronted with the new consumer culture. Department stores, chain stores, ready-made clothes, and packaged goods, from Jell-O and Kellogg’s Corn Flakes to cake mixes, competed for the money and loyalty of female consumers. Hairdressers, cosmetic companies, and department stores offered a growing and ever-changing assortment of styles, even as they also provided new jobs to those unable to afford the latest fashions without a weekly paycheck. The expand-ing array of consumer goods did not, however, decrease women’s domestic workload. They had more furniture to dust, fancier meals to prepare, changing fashions to keep up with, higher standards of cleanliness to maintain, and more time to devote to entertaining. Yet the availability of mass-produced goods to assist the housewife in her chores made her role as consumer highly visible, while making her role as worker nearly invisible.
For the more socially and economically independent young women—those who attended college or beauty and secretarial schools—new worlds of leisure opened up. Bicycling, tennis, and croquet became popular sports for women in the late nineteenth century. So, too, did playing basketball, both in colleges and through industrial leagues. Indeed, women’s colleges made sports a requirement, to offset the stress of intellectual life and produce a more well-rounded woman. Young women who sought an air of sophistication dressed according to the image of the Gibson Girl, the creation of illustrator Charles Dana Gibson. In the 1890s, the Gibson Girl became the model for the energetic, athletic “new woman,” with her upswept hair, fancy hats, long skirts, flowing blouses, and disposable income.
Middle-class men enjoyed their leisure by joining fraternal organizations. Writing in the North American Review in 1897, W. G. Harwood commented that the late nineteenth century was the “Golden Age of Fraternity.” Five and a half million men (of some 19 million adult men in the United States) joined fraternal orders, such as the Odd Fellows, Masons, Knights of Pythias, and Elks. These groups offered middle-class men a network of business contacts and gave them a chance to enjoy a communal, masculine social environment otherwise lacking in their lives.
In fact, historians have referred to a “crisis of masculinity” afflicting a segment of middle- and upper-class men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Middle-class occupations whittled away the sense of autonomy that men had experienced in an earlier era when they worked for themselves. The emergence of corporate capitalism had swelled the ranks of the middle class with organization men, who held salaried jobs in managerial departments. At the same time, the push for women’s rights, especially the right to vote, and women’s increasing involvement in civic associations threatened to reduce absolute male control over the public sphere.
Responding to this gender crisis, middle-class men sought ways to exert their masculinity and keep from becoming frail and effeminate. Psychologists like G. Stanley Hall warned that unless men returned to a primitive state of manhood, they risked becoming feminized and spiritually paralyzed. To avoid this, they should build up their bodies and engage in strenuous activities to improve their physical fitness. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes (1912) extolled primitive manhood and contrasted its natural virtues with the vices of becoming overcivilized.
Men turned to sports to cultivate their masculinity. Besides playing baseball and football, they could attend various sporting events. Baseball became the national pastime, and men could root for their home team and establish a community with the thousands of male spectators who filled up newly constructed ballparks. These fields of dirt and grass were situated amid urban businesses, apartment buildings, and traffic and served as a metaphor for the preservation of an older, pastoral life alongside the hubbub of modern technology. Baseball, which had started as a game played by elites in New York City in the 1840s, soon became a commercially popular sport. It spread across the country as baseball clubs in different cities competed with each other. The sport came into its own with the creation of the professional National League in 1876 and the introduction of the World Series in 1903 between the winners of the National League and the American League pennant races.
Boxing also became a popular spectator sport in the late nineteenth century. Bare-knuckle fighting—without the protection of gloves—epitomized the craze to display pure masculinity. A boxing match lasted until one of the fighters was knocked out, leaving both fighters bloody and battered.
During the late nineteenth century, middle-class women and men also had increased opportunities to engage in different forms of sociability and sexuality. Gay men and lesbians could find safe havens in New York City’s Greenwich Village and Chicago’s North Side for their own entertainment. Although treated by medical experts as sexual “inverts” who might be cured by an infusion of “normal” heterosocial contact, gays and lesbians began to emerge from the shadows of Victorian-era sexual constraints around the turn of the twentieth century. “Boston marriages” constituted another form of relationship between women. The term apparently came from Henry James’s book The Bostonians (1886), which described a female couple living together in a monogamous, long-term relationship. This conjugal-style association appealed to financially independent women who did not want to get married. Many of these relationships were sexual, but some were not. In either case, they offered women of a certain class an alternative to traditional, heterosexual marriage.