With the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, Theodore
Roosevelt assumed the presidency of the United States. Athlete, soldier,
big-game hunter, and outdoorsman, Roosevelt embodied the "masculine
ideal" at a time when the nineteenth century's rigid values separating
male and female spheres were rapidly changing. Although advertisers
continued to promote images of women as fragile, delicate beauties, by
1910 the suffrage movement had won the vote in four western states,
and women had formed labor unions to address issues specific to their
work. Single men, always plentiful in cities, were joined by an
unprecedented number of "bachelor girls" who lived alone or in
boardinghouses or hotels for women and supported themselves as
teachers, office clerks, salespeople, seamstresses, and service workers. Their labor was a
mainstay of New York's garment industry, and working women were a principal market for
the low-cost, ready-to-wear fashions widely available for the first time. If women's roles were changing, the implications for men were less clear-cut. Cartoons depicting men doing laundry and minding children while their trouser-clad wives read newspapers and smoked cigarettes mocked the reversal of traditional masculine and femine roles. Advertisements for body-building programs reflected widespread concern that corporate routines would sap men of their masculine vitality. Jack London and other popular writers championed combativeness and confrontation as admirable male traits, and Roosevelt urged men to embrace the strenuous life.
The Ashcan artists were fascinated by this moment of transition. They recorded the male preserves of saloon and club and noted the emergence of working women in the public sphere. Glackens delighted in juxtaposing traditional and "new" women; Sloan celebrated the easy camaraderie of women at work and at leisure. Bellows depicted the world of boxing and poked fun at men's efforts to advance the species through physical fitness.