During the Gilded Age, ideas of gender and gender relationships shifted drastically in both public and private spheres. The largest wave of immigration from Europe mixed into a population that had been primarily Anglo-and-African American. Add to this heady current the development of mass consumption, leisure, and the working-class response. Relations between different ethnic groups of women, different classes, and the way power dynamics shaped those interactions complicated women’s social and political struggles. Primary sources such as theatre, print culture, women's diaries, maps, and photographs illuminate dramatic life stories bursting at the seams of early 20th-century Chicago, a setting in Barnett’s novel-in progress, God’s Folly.
Sponsored by the Sarah Lawrence College Graduate Program in Women’s History