The Gilded Age

Gender Roles in the Gilded Age; the Boiling Point:

The massive urbanization during the Gilded Age brought many changes for late nineteenth century society. With the growth of cities and masses of immigrant people coming into the United States, Victorian era style gender roles began to crumble under the expanding spheres of public life demanded by a new generations of women. Marked as a time of upheaval, society faced a separation from traditional ways of life. As such, the Gilded Age is the pivotal point in the nineteenth century when gender roles finally see massive change. “During the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, the nonproductive matron became a symbol of "bourgeois class hegemony" through an ideal now known as the "Cult of True Womanhood”[1], as a “True Woman” was the symbol of purity, and submissive domesticity, and keeper of morality for her family. A good woman was meant to serve her husband and family and protect and teach religious morals to her family as she was the most virtuous member. All of this would begin to change “during the 1880s and 1890s, (when) the New Woman emerged, as the daughters who had watched their mothers struggle for public access came into adulthood”[2], and this New Woman would come to demand greater control over their lives.