SOURCE: “Women in Industrializing America,” in The Gilded Age: Essays on the Origins of Modern America, edited by Charles W. Calhoun, Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1996, pp. 111-35.

In the excerpt below, Cordery enumerates the limitations placed on women by the domestic ideologies of the Gilded Age and shows how, in spite of these, many women were influential activists.

Women were 48 percent of the population during the Gilded Age.¹ Rather than attempting to describe the condition of women of every class, race, ethnicity, religion, and region (among the many categories possible), this essay focuses on how the origins of modern America affected women. As a near majority of the populace, women could not help being touched in tangible ways by the tensions that arose as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth. The determining context of Gilded Age America was the acceleration of industrialization. This process recast the ideology...