Abstract
It is telling that a 1906 Buffalo Courier article begins its listing of the social sets of the city of Buffalo, New York, with a tribute to women, calling them “Grande Dames” of Buffalo “society.” Attributing to them the creation of “society” in Buffalo in the 1880s and 1890s, the article highlights their social activities, leisure pursuits, and founding of women’s clubs and organizations.1 Recognizing those women who were particularly intellectual and cultured, the Courier proceeds to name prominent residents of Buffalo, grouped by their social sets. Elite women, as the newspaper suggests, were powerful agents in this process of class formation and perpetuation in the period 1880 to 1910. In this essay, by focusing on the rituals and practices created to define an elite in the changing and uncertain social milieu of Buffalo, we see that these women’s position as models for the young, arbiters of social taste, and creators of marriage mergers allowed them to create and perpetuate kin networks that would dominate Buffalo society and control access to business and political assets for subsequent generations.2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Mark Goldman, High Hopes: The Rise and Decline of Buffalo, New York (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 21.
J. N. Larned, A History of Buffalo Delineating the Evolution of the City (New York: The Program of the Empire State Co., 1911), 94.
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899;repr., New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1992), 36.
Frederic Cople Jaher, “Style and Status: High Society in Late Nineteenth Century New York,”, The Rich, the Well Born, and the Powerful: Elites and Upper Classes in History, ed. Frederic Cople Jaher (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 272.
David A. Gerber, The Making of an American Pluralism: Buffalo, New York, 1825–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 75–76.
Buffalo Female Academy, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Catalogue and Circular, 1875–6 (Buffalo, NY: A. L. Freeman, 1876), 8.
Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness (Boston: DeWolfe, Fiske, 1879), 184.
Frederic Cople Jaher, The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charlestown, Chicago, and L.A. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 9.
Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories, vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1933), 72–73.
Janice Law Trecker, “Sex, Science and Education,”, History of Women in the United States, ed. Nancy Cott (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1993), 201.
Sara Delamont, “The Contradictions in Ladies’ Education,”, The Nineteenth-Century Woman: Her Cultural and Physical Worlds, ed. Sara Delamont and Lorna Duffin (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1978), 144.
Aileen S. Kraditor, ed., Up from the Pedestal (New York: Quadrangle, 1975), 79.
E. Digby Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958), 10.
Nancy Davis and Barbara Donahue, Miss Porter’s School, A History (Farmington: Miss Porter’s School, 1992), 15–16.
Louise L. Stevenson, “Sarah Porter Educates Useful Ladies, 1847–1900” Winterthur Portfolio 18 (1983), 39.
Nancy Davis and Barbara Donahue, Miss Porter’s School: A History (Farmington, CT: Miss Porter’s School, 1992), 22–23.
Grace Stoddard, “New Girl, Old Girl Song,” Songbook 1891, Student Activities, Box 6, Miss Porter’s School Archive;quoted in Stevenson, “Sarah Porter,” 56.
Arthur S. Reber, Dictionary of Psychology (New York: Penguin, 1985), 366.
Lillian Eichler, Book of Etiquette (Oyster Bay, NY: Nelson Doubleday, 1922), 1:20.
Mabel Dodge Luhan discusses her experiences with Seward Cary in Luhan, Intimate Memories, vol. 2 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), 16–17.
Betty G. Farrell, Elite Families: Class and Power in Nineteenth-Century Boston (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 83.
Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 2.
T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 16–17.
Eric Hobsbawm, “Mass Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914,”, The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 291–93.
Copyright information
© 2010 Sven Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rockwell, M.R. (2010). Elite Women and Class Formation. In: The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230115569_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230115569_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-28751-2
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-11556-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)