Turn of Century was a time of great social upheaval and cultural change for the women of America who inhabited a world that was neither of the nineteenth century nor the twentieth. The first generation of modernist women writers were born during the crisis times leading up to the Civil War and came of age during the American awakening in the cultural tumult of Reconstruction. These women writers and activists were members of a progressive generation that urged racial tolerance, fought for the fifteenth amendment and equality for women rights in society. Above all else, women's modernism was shaped by a radical challenge to linguistic, spiritual, and social conventions, particularly as these writers journeyed further and further from the world of their foremothers into territory marked off as forbidden by patriarchal ideology. For these writers, a reinvention of social and spiritual truths through the alchemy of language was their primary task.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, (Women and Economics) wrote "We are the only animal species in which the female depends on the male for food, the only animal species in which the sex-relation is also an economic relation. With us an entire sex lives in a relation of economic dependence upon the other sex, and the economic relation is combined with the sex relation. The economic status of the human female is relative to the sex relation." The dawn of the consumer era brought on new spending opportunities for most Americans; however, it did nothing to loosen the standards of behavior to which women adhered. In fact, it may have even defined their roles more strictly. Because there were more opportunities to spend money, money became more of a focus in society. No longer was America an agrarian society where self-sufficiency was expected. Instead, people became more and more dependent on commercially produced goods, and money gained more power. Those who could afford to buy the most goods were at a great advantage.