Turn-of-the-twentieth-century transitions: women on the edge of tomorrow

Introduction In the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, well-documented changes in daily life opened new horizons for women. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, as Jo Ann Argersinger writes, “the forces of industrialization transformed American society with an intensity that shattered traditions and stirred imaginations” ( Triangle Fire , 2). The labor force swelled with thousands of new immigrants; the Great Migration of African Americans from rural to urban areas began around 1912; and while many American women had been working for decades, housebound middle-class women also began to go to work. As Jean-Michel Rabate wrote, “urban America changed more between 1890–1910 than in the whole previous century” ( 1913 , 16). One of the largest industries to which women flocked was the ready-to-wear clothing industry. New modes of production, improved technologies like the steam-powered sewing machines of the 1870s, marketing, advertising, and distribution made for increased consumption. Consumption mirrored class aspiration, allowing for “the working class's ‘dream world’ of bourgeois consumption” to parallel “the bourgeoisie's ‘dream world’ of aristocratic forms,” argues Nancy L. Green in Ready to Wear, Ready to Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York . Sweatshop worker Sadie Frowne wrote in 1902, “a girl must have clothes if she is to go into high society at Ulmer Park or Coney Island or the theatre . . . a girl who does not dress well is stuck in a corner, even if she is pretty, and Aunt Fanny says that I do just right to put on plenty of style” (Argersinger, Triangle Fire , 55).