Using Privilege to Transcend Tradition: An Analysis of Gender and Power in the Home

This paper demonstrates how Gilded Age New York's female achieved power, and derived pleasure, within the domains of their families and homes. It illuminates the ways wealthy women alternately typified and transgressed contemporary middle-class gender norms, thus complicating our understanding of the era’s sexual dictates. The rules governing power dynamics between and within each sex, it argues, were distinct for the upper class; so too different attitudes and aspirations spurred elite women's roles and relationships.  In a society powered and perpetuated by marital alliances, it asks, what expectations did women hold for marriage, and what forms did their partnerships take? Able to delegate child-rearing and household toil to others, how did they adapt, and contest, codes of feminine virtue predicated on domestic labor and confinement? How did their privilege lead them to set new norms for themselves? Such questions address both the unique ways female elites bolstered the prospects of their society at large, and their quieter avenues for fulfillment and freedom therein.

Using wealthy women's untapped records, this paper newly engages with their personal politics of identity—and in so doing, places its subjects at the center of their own stories. Elite women set down their thoughts and feelings for posterity in many forms. This paper therefore juxtaposes private sources, including diaries and correspondence, against etiquette manuals, journalistic accounts, and fiction written by and about elite women. In reading between the lines wealthy women and their peers rendered on the page, it draws on insights from sociology, psychology, literary analysis, and gender studies. Using a cast of female characters famous in their day and beyond, it excavates the agency afforded wealthy women by traditional gender roles, and the ways they utilized their privilege to transcend them.