One of the central themes of E.L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime is the tranformation of the leading female charactes of the novel from stereotypical repressed Victorian women into liberated and even feminist heroines. Doctorow's choice of the women's movement as a theme is appropriate to the period of his novel, which is set in the decade between l906 and l9l5. This was an heroic period in the women's movement, and the newspapers and books of the day were full of the scandalous affairs of women who were supposed to represent either the downfall or the triumph of their sex. In this essay, we will examine the rise of the women's movement as it is reflected in the story of Ragtime to see how Doctorow utilized the events of the day to develop his mythical American archetypes.

The women's movement already had a long and vigorous history by the turn of the century, yet women in America remained nearly as oppressed as they had been half a century earlier, when the feminists of the Seneca Falls resolution voiced the following complaint:

In marriage, a wife was compelled to pledge obedience and to give her husband "power to deprive her of her liberty." In business, man "mon

In a pattern that is the reverse of Evelyn's, Mother discovers the freedom of her sexuality through the rebirth of her social conscience and nurturing instinct. She epitomizes the mature Victorian woman's plunge into the women's movement, and the quick pace that emancipation took after respectable women of the upper-middle classes took a part in securing the vote.

Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. New York: Dell, l972.

Decter, Midge. The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women's Liberation. New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan,

opolized nearly all the profitable employments." And in morals, woman suffered from an iniquitous double standard dictated by men who claimed it as their right to "assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God."

Mother wore black for a year. At the end of this time Tateh, having ascertained that his wife had died, proposed marriage. he said I am not a baron, of course. I am a Jewish socialist from Latvia. Mother accepted him without hesitation...Their marriage was joyful though without issue.

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Approximate Word count = 2642
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page double spaced)