Sambo Fisher
Jayne Santos
English 101
May 22, 2008
Many Faces
There is no good if there is no evil. In the early 1900s, a time of change brought many prosperous beginnings, a time for capitalism, a time for opportunities. However, with them came a time of conflict and turmoil for the poor, the immigrants, and the ostracized—women. In society a woman was classified as the maiden, the nurturer, the Madonna, the sex goddess, the witch, or the whore. In the novel Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow portrays these different types of women as Mameh, Mother, Evelyn Nesbit, and Emma Goldman. Doctorow uses fictional characters along with real historical characters to paint a colorful and vivid picture of these times, to portray the social class distinctions, the morality of women, and the many undergoing changes of this era.
Like an hour glass figure the social classes were very distinct among women; there were the rich, the poor, and a few in between. The women of higher social status, the wealthy were embedded with the idea that sexual purity was a must in order to get married. It was considered a stain in a family’s reputation for a woman to have premarital sex and worse promiscuous sex. The importance of reputation is clearly illustrated in Ragtime. “Runaway women died in the rigors of ecstasy. Stories were hushed up and reporters paid off by rich families” (Doctorow 4). To women of wealth marriage was their goal, and their reputation was the only thing they had. In contrast to the wealthy, the poor were not worried as much about their reputation, but more on hunger and struggling to survive. “Thousands [of women] toiled in such desperate conditions for so little that many fell into prostitution” (Mc Donald 50). Doctorow illustrates this picture of the women in poverty when he uses Mameh as the face of the poor maiden who turns to selling her body to keep her family out of the