612 ★ CHAPTER 16 America’s Gilded Age
of articles by reporter Nell Cusack under the title “City Slave Girls,” exposing
wretched conditions among the growing number of women working for wages
in the city’s homes, factories, and sweatshops. The articles unleashed a flood of
letters to the editor from women workers. One woman singled out domestic
service— still the largest employment category for women— as “a slave’s life,”
with “long hours, late and early, seven days in the week, bossed and ordered
about as before the war.”
Sunshine and Shadow: Increasing
Wealth and Poverty
At the other end of the economic spectrum, the era witnessed an unprecedented
accumulation of wealth. Class divisions became more and more visible. In
frontier days, all classes in San Francisco, for example, lived near the waterfront.
In the late nineteenth century, upper- class families built mansions on Nob Hill
and Van Ness Avenue (known as “millionaire’s row”). In eastern cities as well, the
rich increasingly resided in their own exclusive neighborhoods and vacationed
among members of their own class at exclusive resorts like Newport, Rhode
Island. The growing urban middle class of professionals, office workers, and
small businessmen moved to new urban and suburban neighborhoods linked
to central business districts by streetcars and commuter railways. “Passion for
money,” wrote the novelist Edith Wharton in The House of Mirth (1905), domi-
nated society. Wharton’s book traced the difficulties of Lily Bart, a young woman
of modest means pressured by her mother and New York high society to “bar-
ter” her beauty for marriage to a rich husband in a world where “to be poor...
amounted to disgrace.”
By 1890, the richest 1 percent of Americans received the same total income
as the bottom half of the population and owned more property than the
remaining 99 percent. Many of the wealthiest Americans consciously pursued
an aristocratic lifestyle, building palatial homes, attending exclusive social
clubs, schools, and colleges, holding fancy- dress balls, and marrying into each
other’s families. In 1899, the economist and social historian Thorstein Veblen
published The Theory of the Leisure Class, a devastating critique of an upper- class
culture focused on “conspicuous consumption”—that is, spending money not
on needed or even desired goods, but simply to demonstrate the possession of
wealth. One of the era’s most widely publicized spectacles was an elaborate cos-
tume ball organized in 1897 by Mrs. Bradley Martin, the daughter of a New York
railroad financier. The theme was the royal court of prerevolutionary France.
The Waldorf- Astoria Hotel was decorated to look like the palace of Versailles,
the guests wore the dress of the French nobility, and the hostess bedecked her-
self with the actual jewels of Queen Marie Antoinette.