Charles C

“Their fervor partly came from yet another front in the war at home: a long-growing tension over the changing positions of men and women. This was magnifying anxieties among American men. Fifty years before the First World War, most of them worked on farms, doing the strenuous field labor that had defined manhood for millennia. Farm wives and widows sometimes had to do such tasks as well, but men still traditionally preferred to imagine women as doing only women’s work, such as cooking, cleaning, sewing, and fetching water from the well. The census did not even count such farm women as workers.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis – A Gripping Historical Account of 20th Century America