Horace Greeley, among others, had previously stated that he could not support the feminists because they were too closely tied to the cause of free love. Now, Woodhull's pronouncements, and her widely publicized association with feminists, appeared to confirm Greeley's allegation. .

             The typical attack upon the women's movement, on every issue from labor reform to suffrage, was that women's sexual instincts were too delicate (or too dangerous) to be loosed upon the world. Such scandals supported the patriarchal contention that women could not be trusted with equality, but they also served to keep the women's issues in the forefront of the American popular imagination.

             The three scandals of women at the turn of the century that Doctorow weaves into the tapestry of Ragtime are the shooting of Evelyn Nesbit, the outcry against prostitution that was raised by Theodore Dreiser's novel Sister Carrie, and the persecution of the radical socialist Emma Goldman. Each of these stories shows a slightly different aspect of the condition of women in late Victorian times, and Doctorow clearly feels that they represent turning points in the popular attitude toward women. The influence of these famous figures on the lives of the fictional women of Ragtime, Mother, Sarah, and the Little Girl, is profound, if slow in its development.

             The story of Evelyn Nesbit with which E. L, Doctorow opens his novel was the "Champagne Murder" scandal in which Nesbit's depraved husband, millionaire playboy Harry Thaw, shot and killed her lover, the prominent architect Stanford White, at the opening night of a musical at Madison Square Garden. Nesbit was a famed beauty, a photographer's model who had been seduced by White at age 16 and had married Thaw at 20, apparently without abandoning her relationship with the older man. In the tabloid press and magazines of the day, Nesbit was depicted as the ideal of beauty and charm:.