Everyday Life and Women in America, 1800-1920

Everyday Life & Women in America comprises thousands of fully searchable images of monographs, pamphlets, periodicals and broadsides addressing 19th and early 20th century political, social and gender issues, religion, race, education, employment, marriage, sexuality, home and family life, health, and pastimes.

The bulk of the collection is taken from Duke’s Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, but the most unique portion is a rare extensive run of Town Topicsfrom New York Public Library, which chronicled the New York social world during the height of the Gilded Age.  It figures prominently in the fiction of numerous New York writers, such as Edith Wharton, and was both the public face of the elite set and  a “how-to” manual for the nouveaux riches.  It may be studied not only as a mirror of society but as an aspirational “how-to” manual for the newly wealthy or the striving middle-class of the industrial era.