"a distinctive middle-class culture began to exert a powerful influence over the whole of American life."
white collar salaries rose by one-third from1890 to1910, and the professions experienced a "dramatic increase in both the prestige and the profitability of their professions."
The rise of "an enormous industry devoted to producing ready-made garments" caused new interest in personal style and fashion. Mail order catalogs from Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck were "wish books" for the new middle-class homes that began to feature clothes closets, grooming furniture, labor-saving appliances, canned and refigerated processed food.
"The rise of mass consumption had particularly dramatic effects on American women," such as shopping, cooking, work and leisure. Women became sales clerks in department stores and waitresses in restaurants.
"One of the most distinctive characteristics of late-19th and early-20th century urban leisure was its intensely public character."
New centers of urban leisure were public spaces such as public parks, the Coney Island amusement park, roller skate rinks, dance halls, vaudeville, chautauqua, nickelodeons and movie palaces, saloons, sports stadiums for professional baseball and college football and boxing and horse racing.
Women increasingly became active outside the home in golf and tennis and bicycling and croquet.
Urban theaters "introduced one of the most distinctively American entertainment forms: the musical comedy." George M. Cohan became "the first great creator of musical comedies in the early 20th century," and Irving Berlin wrote more than 1,000 songs for the musical theater, and Thomas Edison made short films based on musical comedies.
New forms of private leisure developed for the urban middle class: indoor lighting improved with kerosene and electrical lights, allowing more reading of poetry and dime novels and books by Tom Swift and Horatio Alger and Louisa May Alcott. Women's education improved with the spread of free public schools and colleges for women. Private leisure also included music. "Middle-class girls often spent years studying the piano, the harp, or some other parlor instrument and giving performances for family and friends in the home. The sale of sheet music soared to provide material for these domestic musicals. The general popularity of ragtime extended into the home as well in the 1890s when the music of Scott Joplin and other ragtime composers was published for the first time."
Advertising developed to stimulate mass consumption, and daily newspaper circulation increased ninefold 1870-1910. "One striking change was the emergence of national press services" and great newspaper chains such as those of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, the pioneers of "yellow journalism," and mass circulation magazines such as Ladies Home Journal of Edward Bok.
Sources:
quotes from Alan Brinkley. American History, A Survey. 11th ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 2002.
images from American Memory collections, Library of Congress
