Marriage & Etiquette
A satirical photo from 1901, with the caption "New Woman — Wash Day."
Popular women’s guidebooks illustrate the ideal turn-of-the-century young woman.
Her dresses are long and modest, her manners are refined, and her femininity is perfected. She only exercises when wearing a “loose dress” and always lives according to “God’s perfect plan.”4 She never marries an immoral man, lest her lips be infected by a “morbid poison.”5
This woman, so modest, refined, and feminine, seems to juxtapose the Progressive Era woman, like the one above, though they live during the same time period. The Progressive Era’s “new woman,” making inroads in politics, protesting child labor, and advocating women’s rights, exhibits much more freedom, and perhaps less femininity.6
Are these two women really complete opposites, or do they have more in common than we might think? Explore the items Building Your Boy, Twentieth Century Etiquette, and What a Young Woman Ought to Know to see how each of these women navigated practices of marriage and etiquette during the Progressive Era.
4Mary Wood-Allen, M.D., What a Young Woman Ought to Know (Sylvanus Stall, 1913), 25-75.
5 Ibid, 237.
6Elizabeth D. Blum, “Women, Environmental Rationale, and Activism During the Progressive Era,” In To Love the Wind and the Rain: African Americans and Environmental History (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 1.