Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876-1915

Kirkus Review

A detailed, lively survey of the commonplace objects, events, experiences, products, and tastes that comprised America's Victorian culture, expressed its values, and shaped modern life. Between the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876 and the San Francisco one in 1915, the US population doubled, redistributed itself, and developed the character and lifestyle identified with the middle classes in the 20th century.

Its mobility required roads, trains, trolleys, maps, canals, autos; new means of communication in telephones, telegraphs, and mass media; and a standard time devised by railroads and measured by alarm clocks, time clocks, and cheap watches.

New economic systems emerged: farms were commercialized; foods were processed (Kellogg's), condensed (Borden's), preserved (Heinz), distributed in food chains (A&P), promoted through advertising, and identified with brand names and slogans.

New occupations emerged; typewriters created secretaries who cultivated new standards of personal appearance wearing shirtwaists, using cosmetics, shopping in department stores, and visiting beauty parlors. Toothpaste, razor blades, health foods, and spas expressed the rising interest in personal fitness as well as recreation, which extended to moving pictures, spectator sports, public gardens, amusement parks, and bicycles—all based on the new technologies, on the new vision of people mastering nature.

But the book is not all trivia, not just the Juicy Fruit gum and the cafeteria-eating that Americans discovered at the San Francisco Fair. Schlereth, a writer of immense tact and range, recounts with equal interest and vitality the wholeconstellation of events that surrounded the development of suburban living, domestic history, the labor movement, the architecture of colleges—and conveys it seamlessly. The notes reveal something of his erudition, his ability to see the relationships, to depict unpretentiously this complex period of cultural history with all its ironies and color. A splendid achievement. (Forty-three pages of photographs.)

Excerpts

Moving

Migration and movement, mobility and motion characterized identity in Victorian America. A country in transition was also in transit. Everyone seemed en route: emigrating and immigrating, removing or being removed, resettling and relocating, in many directions- east to west, south to north, rural to urban, urban to suburban.

Not everyone who emigrated to America stayed to be an immigrant in America. Roughy a fourth to a third who came left again.

Railroads reshaped the American-built environment and reoriented American behavior.

It standrdized time and travel, seeking to annihilate distance and space by allowing movement at any time and in any season or type of weather.

Over a third of the labor-capital confrontations from 1870 to 1920 involved the railroads.

Autos
The self-propelled vehicle altered commuting and communication routines. It created a new built environment of auto showrooms, gasoline stations, motels, fast-food franchises, and surface highways. It fostered driving schools (…), necessitated personal liability insurance (…), and stimulated a new era in American cartography (thousands of road maps were distributed by oil companies by the 1920s). It gave new meaning to the American fascination with being on the move. With the massive highway system it ultimately created, it eventually transformed the American house (with its built-in garage), as well as the urban and rural landscapes.

Inventing Standard Time
Decisions about time itself changed in postbellum America. Modern time, with its kinship to movement, came into being for the first time. Time no longer conformed to the natural rhythms of the sun and seasons, but to the mechanical pace of the pocket watch, the factory whistle, or the railroad-station clock.

On Sunday, November 18, 1883, at noon, Standard Railway Time went into effect with the fall of Western Union’s New York time ball.

Working
Women and children entered the American work force in large numbers. Marginal, part-time, and seasonal workers also increased. Tenant farmers, sharecroppers, hired hands, and migrant workers toiled in agriculture, while their urban counterparts- railroad laborers, construction workers, and day men- worked day to day in temporary jobs.

Office work absorbed more and more women within the business bureaucracies that began expanding in the 1880s. The corporate revolution prompted the need for managers (…) and monitors (…). Finally, service work- both the labor of household servants and that of service professionals, such as teachers, nurses, and social workers- increased.

To ensure that 15,000 laborers would be on the lines daily, Ford had to hire 53,000 people a year. To buy the stability of its work force and to thwart union organizing, the company cut the workday to eight hours in 1914 and instituted a wage-and-bonus system that raised laborers’ earnings to five dollars per day, about twice the norm for industrial workers. (…) (The next year the company had to hire only 6,500 new employees.).

Middle-Class Yearly Family Budget

Budget of the Wells Family, 1911

Source: Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876-1915