Children were a special concern of women reformers in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Assembling in federations and associations, women were, as Mary Odem has written, “especially active in efforts that aimed to protect women, children, and the home from the harmful effects of rapid urban growth and industrial capitalism.” Poor children were at risk due to industrial accidents, epidemics, and the stress and exhaustion of simply surviving in crowded tenements and polluted cities. Daphne Spain has suggested that women “saved the city” by starting political coalitions, improving neighborhood environments, and fighting for a wide range of protective legislation. Among those reforms was the nationwide movement to establish medical services for children. New pediatric wards and children's hospitals were intended to be places of comfort and cure as well as moral and spiritual education for the “little sufferers” and their parents.

In 1968 Outdoor Life ran a retrospective piece that examined the turn-of-the-century origins of this popular sportsmen's magazine. In the article, editor William Rae noted, with some dismay, that two out of the first three stories in the December 1905 issue featured women hunters, including the tale of a “tireless Diana” who left her corset at home in order to take to the fields. “One wonders,” Rae commented dryly, “whether men really were men in those days, as we have been led to believe.” Clearly, Rae found the spectacle of sport hunting women unusual, and he assumed that their presence in the pages of a hunting periodical called into question the masculinity of earlier sportsmen. The connection that Rae and Outdoor Life readers made in 1968 between hunting and masculinity remains a commonplace. As feminist scholar Mary Zeiss Stange argues, hunting “might be, in the popular mind, the most male-identified cultural pursuit.”

In 1903, Alan Dale, the theater critic for the New York American and Journal, when contemplating the state of the American stage, came to the conclusion that “the only national theatre I can find, after severe cogitation, is that beautiful, flip, and classic commodity known as musical comedy.” Dale pointed out that musical comedy's exorbitant popularity was a recent development, emerging only in the previous five or ten years, and that his anointing of the form as the national theater would not sit well with more serious-minded devotees of drama. “Well read gentlemen with heavy minds,” wrote Dale, would prefer different sorts of productions, plays that “mere commercial managers don't want to stage and mere amusement seekers don't want to see.” Seeking an improbable bridge over this cultural divide, Dale suggested that “[Henrik] Ibsen might air his neat little views on heredity in happy verse set to music…[His] favorite subject of maggots on the brain” could feature a “chorus of pretty girls disguised as maggots.”