Marriage Making News

Name: Marriage Making News
Price: 260 AUD
Availability: PreOrder
ISBN: 9780252049767

Working Women and Millionaire Men in the Progressive Era

Carole Srole

$260

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

University of Illinois Press
16 June 2026

Communication studies; History of the Americas; 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000; Gender studies: women; Sociology: family & relationships

Series: Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History

The couplings of millionaires with stenographers, servants, and other so-called working girls supplied early twentieth-century newspapers with sensational headlines and swarms of eager readers. Carole Srole delves into how the media prominence and popularity of these unions reflected unease over the rapid changes shaking American society.

Women's desire for autonomy, a rising divorce rate, the declining power of the upper class, new ideas of beauty and sexuality – newspaper tales of cross-class nuptials brought a host of anxieties about gender and class to the front page. Srole focuses particular attention on the economic changes faced by working-class women while also surveying newspaper attacks on their morality and womanhood, and their complicity in their own poverty. As she shows, working women and their advocates persevered by asserting an independence they pursued through union activism, professionalism, land ownership, and filling traditionally male jobs.

An engaging merger of media and women's history, Marriage Making News looks at a rags-to-riches genre and illuminates the forces of change at work behind the stories.

By: Carole Srole
Imprint: University of Illinois Press
Country of Publication: United States
Edition: New edition
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9780252049767
ISBN 10: 0252049764
Series: Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History
Pages: 304
Publication Date: 16 June 2026
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Carole Srole is an emeritus professor of history at California State University, Los Angeles.

Reviews for Marriage Making News: Working Women and Millionaire Men in the Progressive Era

""Srole's fascinating premise, clever methodology, and significant insights shape a compelling account of how marriages between millionaires and working-class women illuminate anxiety about gender and class transformation during the Progressive era."" --Alison Lefkovitz, author of Strange Bedfellows: Marriage in the Age of Women's Liberation