Men Are from the Gilded Age,
Women Are from the Progressive Era

Elisabeth Israels Perry
St. Louis University

This is an expanded version of the presidential address I gave to the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE) at their meeting in 2000.  In Part I, I use the catchphrase "Men are from the Gilded Age, Women are from the Progressive Era" as a way of making a critique of Progressive-era historiography from the perspective of women's history.  In Part II, I suggest four specific ways in which Progressive-era historians might respond to that critique.	1
I
In 1984, when Allen Davis published a new edition of his 1967 landmark study of the social settlement movement, he wrote in his preface, "Nothing has changed the writing of history more in the last decade and a half than the emergence of women's history."1  Over fifteen years have passed since then, and yet even with the explosion of scholarly work in women's history from the mid-eighties onward, Progressive-era historians have not changed their treatment of women as much as they might have.	2
In this essay I make a few observations about this issue.  I begin with a confession.  When I attended the first organizational meeting of SHGAPE, I did not join the Society.  The room was filled with men who, it seemed to me at the time, were interested primarily in studying Gilded Age presidencies.  My interests and theirs did not coincide.  A few years later, Kathryn Kish Sklar called to say she had become a SHGAPE officer and to ask if I would participate in a SHGAPE panel she was putting together for the next meeting of the Organization of American Historians.  Not only did I take part on that panel, but shortly afterward I was asked to serve as a SHGAPE officer myself.  Later, in trying to explain why I had originally spurned an organization in which I was now an officer, I found myself saying, "Well, you know, men are from the Gilded Age and women are from the Progressive Era, and there were too many men in that room!"2	3
. . .