As recent historical study of women has so consistently shown, nineteenth- century middle-class Americans viewed women as dependent, emotional, deeply religious, and sexually pure beings who were supposed to tend the domestic fires and to bear and rear children. Men, on the other hand, were thought of as stalwart citizen-producers, family providers, rational people who found personal fulfillment in public life and in the individual ownership of property. The public life was male, and individualism a male legacy that only a few women dared claim as their own. By 1915 that older paradigm had been deeply weakened by the transformation of work. Men now received wages and salaries in factories or in ever-expanding corporate and bureaucratic structures,
