The woman became the mother and manager of the middle class home during this Victorian era. The home becomes a moral beacon and couples decide that having children was not just to have more workers in the family. Couples began family planning to help reduce expenses since family farms were becoming less and less important for survival. This led to a desexualization of the marriage. Men and women began to sleep and separate bedrooms and only had sex as a means of procreation, not recreation. Women began to desexualize their bodies by covering them fully from head to toe and they repressed their sexual thoughts. It became the notion to hold back your sexual desire until your wedding night and that men and women married for ideals only.

As the private agenda was succeeding for the middle class they began to complain about the loss of energy, which would later be dubbed “the middle class disease”. A lot of this loss of energy was

Around the 1890’s women began to enter the workforce becoming both the mother and working class woman. Many lower middle class families would not let their daughters work in factories so the office became the place to work. According to Olivier Zunz, “The middle class family made sure that employers enforced a strict code of behavior for their daughters as well as impose a safe separation between men and women in the workplace.” (Inside the Skyscraper, 117). Women followed a dress code that consisted of a long dark skirt, covered with a white apron, a white blouse, and a black bow tie. Their hair had to be pulled up at all times.

The experiences of middle class women, and the middle class in general, thoroughly show the changing times of American urban society. Women were pretty close to achieving their social goals by the 1900’s. In leaving the home and getting out into the workforce they were able to establish themselves within society to prove that they too can make a difference. The middle class woman became that emerging figure in society that everyone wanted to be like. She had a freedom of self that allowed her to show society what she was made of.

Middle class homes had many expectations. They usually took the elite style and made it affordable. Homes had more rooms and an excess of goods. Parlors became very popular and women used them quite frequently. There were very

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