In Kathy Peiss’s novel, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York, she examines the women-driven movement that revolutionized American culture in New York City during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Peiss focused her attention on young, single women from working-class immigrant families, and how they were able to transform both society’s idea of commercialized leisure and the relations that existed between genders. As the size of the young, female working-class grew, women began seeking the same recreations that working-class men enjoyed. This initiated the shift in social engagements from homosocial, as they were in the Victorian Era, to heterosocial, with men and women interacting together. The ideas of dating, romance and marriage were being transformed due …show more content…
In the Victorian Era, women commonly held domestic service jobs and worked in small sweatshops, but by the 1890’s women’s jobs shifted primarily to department stores, factories, offices, and restaurants. This resulted in less hours and new work environments, often mixed-sex (Peiss, 35). In these new settings, “women’s conversations, stories, and songs, often gravitated to the subject of dating and romantic entanglements with men, a discourse that accentuated the mixed-sex character of their leisure” (Peiss, 49). Not only did they discuss romance, but they also talked about more sexual topics, which was considered very unusual in the years preceding this time. Women of multiple professions, including waitresses, department store workers, and factory workers, participated in these vulgar conversations during work, that often reflected behaviors of off work leisure (Peiss, 50). This synthesized the development of newfound feelings of freedom and sexual expression, as well as changed the ways in which men and women dated and behaved