Season 3/Episode 2, "What the Papers Say"

Women and Power in “The Gilded Age”

By Genna Duplisea, Preservation Society Archivist

When George Russell asks his wife, Bertha, when he will get a say in their daughter Gladys’ life, she replies that he will get it when she can come into his board room and make decisions about railroads. Gilded Age America does not afford Bertha economic or political power, so in orchestrating her daughter’s marriage and the public discourse surrounding it (via her leaks to newspapers), Bertha exerts power in one of the only ways she can — but at the cost of her daughter’s agency. She believes she is granting Gladys the agency to change lives and the world in the future, yet can only do so by taking away her choice of husband. Gladys’ options for her future shrink throughout the episode, which ends in her horror as the parts of her mother’s plan to marry her off to Hector, the Duke of Buckingham, fall into place.

Published in 1904, “The American Book of Beauty” (PSNC.4470) reproduced portraits of society women in a luxurious volume, showing the tastemakers — and, in some cases, eligible debutantes — of the day. This publication surely would have featured Gladys later in her life. The copy in our collection was owned by Lily Oelrichs Martin, a relative of Hermann Oelrichs of Rosecliff. Along with Consuelo Vanderbilt of Marble House, Lily was another American woman who became the wife of a European noble, marrying the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin in 1915.

The real Grace Wilson Vanderbilt, pictured here, was the sister-in-law of Carrie Astor (later Wilson), whom we see briefly in this episode played by Amy Forsyth.sim

Gladys’ short-lived escape from home is illustrated by her absence in the episode’s opening, as the staff runs through a series of empty rooms looking for her. The sequence seamlessly blends several sets into the Russells’ Fifth Avenue home: the second-floor hallway, servants’ stairs and Mrs. Berwind’s bedroom at The Elms; the Music Room at The Breakers; and the soundstage set of the foyer and sitting room.

The most powerful scene in the episode shows Agnes sitting with Peggy Scott’s parents to speak across the vast racial divide that their society has set between them. The fear for the well-being of one’s children is universal, and the three of them agree on the importance of good manners, but Mr. Scott points out that those good manners will not compensate for two and a half centuries of slavery. Mrs. van Rhijn is only one person, and not powerful enough to change the behaviors or prejudices of the people around her; even her maid Armstrong struggles to treat people of color as people, and in the previous episode, as Mr. Scott points out, the van Rhijns’ doctor was not afraid enough of Agnes to overcome his prejudice and treat Peggy in her illness.

A glimmer of possibility flickers briefly in the offer from a women’s group in Newport for Peggy to come and speak to them about her writing. The existence of this group shows women building spaces of mutual support for themselves. Its inclusion in “The Gilded Age” honors real women’s groups that existed in Newport, such as the suffrage groups that emerged several decades later after the turn of the century.