When it comes to the dizzying wealth disparities and social inequalities in our current moment that recall those of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we seem to be caught in a vicious cycle. The more things change, the more things appear to remain the same. To be sure, “refer[ring] to the contemporary era as ‘the New Gilded Age’” can seem at once apposite and dispiriting.Footnote ¹ It can also be somewhat imprecise: “the term ‘Second’ or ‘New Gilded Age’” has “describ[ed] everything from the junk-bond 1980s to the internet-bubble 1990s, and the Collateralized-Debt-Obligation 2000s to the top-1-percent 2010s.”Footnote ² As much as recent scholarship, popular outlets, and even a documentary film have asserted that we find ourselves in another “Gilded Age” since the 1980s, such a conceit is arguably specious. That said, reflecting upon the Gilded Age can illuminate our own current moment in terms of political economy more generally, not to mention why gender and sexuality are critical considerations when it comes to analyzing a host of dynamics within capitalism.

In 1890, activist Mary Elizabeth Lease was convinced that the United States had devolved into “a nation of inconsistencies.” Lease also acidly observed that the nation “no longer [had] a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.”Footnote ³ The daughter of Irish immigrants, Lease and her husband lost their pharmacy and farm during the economic downturn of the 1870s. Lawyer though she was, Lease belonged to the Knights of Labor and was one of the most electric populist organizers of her day—one who was characterized alternately as being “‘unsexed,’” as a “‘rabble rousing female fanatic,’” or as possessing “‘a large degree of both the feminine and the masculine’” in her person. If anti-populist detractors claimed that the earnings from Lease's crusading activity emasculated her husband, if her feminism unnerved contemporaries, Lease was a mesmerizing populist speaker who enthralled audiences across Kansas, Missouri, the South, and the West.Footnote ⁴

Whereas populists are included in most standard narratives about the Gilded Age (ca. 1870–1900), women are not often firmly associated with populism. To its credit, the recent PBS documentary, The Gilded Age (2018), prominently situates Mary Lease within populism. However, the documentary provides but fleeting coverage of Lease's advocacy of a key reform perhaps more associated with the Progressive Era: woman suffrage. It says nothing of her temperance advocacy. It does not highlight how Lease could pointedly link women's grassroots activism with populist agitation. Nor does it feature and then linger upon the implications of Lease's exclamation that, “shopgirls in New York are forced to sell their virtue for the bread their niggardly wages deny them[.]”Footnote ⁵ And, while the documentary is compelling and laudably draws on diverse historians—among them Nell Painter, Jack Tchen, H. W. Brands, David Nasaw, Susie Pak, Steve Fraser, Paula Giddings, Jackson Lears, Julia Ott, Noam Maggor, Edward O'Donnell, Richard White, and Rebecca Edwards—the film does little to explore women as workers during the Gilded Age, to establish that gender had anything to do with clashes between labor and capital, that widening and ever-stark social inequalities might have had varying impacts on sexuality.Footnote ⁶ Indeed, if The Gilded Age encourages viewers to make connections between the previous fin de siècle and our present historical moment, it essentially limits its consideration of women to inclusion of Mary Elizabeth Lease and socialite (and eventual suffragist) Alva Smith Vanderbilt. It perhaps goes without saying that its portrayal of robber barons, let alone Henry George and Jacob Coxey, does not incorporate considerations of either manhood or masculinity. Sexuality really does not figure into the documentary at all, save for coverage of Mary Lease's outrage over Alva Vanderbilt's calculated partnering of her daughter, Consuelo, in a loveless marriage to the ninth Duke of Marlborough largely to restore Alva's social standing after her scandalous divorce from William K. Vanderbilt.Footnote ⁷

In certain regards, it seems easier (or even more logical) to associate histories of gender and sexuality with the reform impetus that suffused the Progressive Era rather than the economic panics or combustible coexistence of opulent wealth with exploited, alienated wage workers during the Gilded Age.Footnote ⁸ Leigh Ann Wheeler even maintains that, “neither gender nor sexuality, as they are known today, structured lives and identities in the Gilded Age.”Footnote ⁹ We cannot say, though, that sex differentiation, erotic activities, and sexual violence did not exist during this period—that these dynamics informed neither quotidian existence nor social movements.Footnote ¹⁰ Or, for that matter, can we deny that women were concerned with controlling their fertility; that particular anxieties and notions about manhood shaped domestic politics and imperial endeavors; that sexual experimentation occurred in Gilded Age utopian communities; or that free love advocates challenged heterodox notions about sexual partnering. Instead, it is critical to underscore that our current understandings of gender and sexuality actually started to coalesce during the late nineteenth century. Not only did the categories of “heterosexual” and “homosexual” emerge, but as Kimberly Hamlin usefully contends, “a new regime of gender policing took the place of separate spheres” during this period as well.Footnote ¹¹ These very phenomena make gender and sexuality part of the warp and weft of Gilded Age societal fabric.

Yet we still need to interrogate how or whether our understanding of gender and sexuality during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries itself is hindered by separating—or, for that matter, lumping together—“Gilded Age” and “Progressive Era.”Footnote ¹² And it is, of course, critical to consider the experiences of working women when it comes to histories of the Gilded Age.Footnote ¹³ While women such as Alva Smith Vanderbilt were part of—or strove to belong to—the 1 percent during the Gilded Age, women were unquestionably among the ranks of immiserated workers during the late nineteenth century. For one, the strikes that rocked the Gilded Age included those organized by black laundresses.Footnote ¹⁴ In 1888, moreover, reporter Nell Cusack exposed miseries endured by “City Slave Girls” who toiled in Chicago's sweatshops, factories, and homes.Footnote ¹⁵ Women also labored as store clerks and clerical workers. If notions that women's ostensibly smaller hands made them particularly suited to typing emerged during the late nineteenth century, it was during the Gilded Age when clerical jobs—“clean” work that was better remunerated than the grind of garment sweatshops, domestic work, airless factories, and the like—arguably became a “pink collar” profession.Footnote ¹⁶ And, the very industrialization and urbanization that was a hallmark of the Gilded Age occasioned a “high degree of transience and large scale migration from rural areas to cities (often across national boundaries)” that fueled “speculations on the proper relationship among gender, sexuality, and sexual anatomy[.]”Footnote ¹⁷ Such dynamics seem eerily current.

Still, we should proceed with caution when it comes to embracing analogies that posit a “new” or “second” Gilded Age.Footnote ¹⁸ We might instead think about the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as being a period of high capitalism, and our current moment as reflecting a particular phase of capitalism.Footnote ¹⁹ Consider, for example, the following assertion by Karl Marx in his manuscript, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy):

Marx wrote the Grundrisse in 1857 and 1858, but his observations speak powerfully to dynamics that marked the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His observations about capitalism and the “annihilation of space by time” are all the more applicable to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries due to globalization, cybertechnology, and what David Harvey refers to as “time-space compression.”Footnote ²¹ Rail and steamship compressed time during the Gilded Age in terms of transporting raw and manufactured goods produced by agricultural and industrial laborers alike as telegraph facilitated “global communications,”Footnote ²² but fiber optics have all but obliterated time during our own era when it comes to sundry forms of multinational exchange. What might we gain by thinking about the current moment as a stage of capitalism, then?

Whether or not one accepts Glenda Gilmore and Thomas Sugrue's periodization of a “new Gilded Age” as lasting between 1980 and 2000, we are perhaps not experiencing another Gilded Age but are instead ensconced within the absurdities, outrages, and obscenities of late-stage capitalism.Footnote ²³ “Late capitalism,” as theorist Ernest Mandel explained during the 1970s, can be defined as “the epoch in history of the development of the capitalist mode of production in which the contradiction between the growth of the forces of production and the survival of the capitalist relations of production assumes an explosive form.” Or, put another way, we may not have entered a new epoch of capitalism—another chronological era—but are instead witnessing “a further development of the imperialist, monopoly-capitalist epoch.”Footnote ²⁴ And, as Grace Blakely recently observed, late capitalism has perhaps morphed into “zombie capitalism.”Footnote ²⁵ In the words of Chris Harman, early twenty-first century capitalism has become “a zombie system, seemingly dead when it comes to human feelings, but capable of sudden spurts of activity that cause chaos all around.” Financial institutions are not solely responsible for what can be considered the chaotic, parasitic, and even destructive aspects of late-stage capitalism. But, if it was not until the 1980s that “indebtedness began to become central” in the lives of a wide range of people, then financial institutions are certainly among the “undead” that threaten to consume workers.Footnote ²⁶

Since the 1970s, late-stage capitalism has come to feature “rentier capitalists” who are no industrialists in the mold of Andrew Carnegie or even a financier such as J. P. Morgan. Rather, they extract their wealth from the “financialization of the economy,” as a host of working people “have become so indebted that permanently low interest rates are required to avoid another [2008], yet permanently low interest rates only lead to higher levels of indebtedness.”Footnote ²⁷ If, as Katherine Newman and Elisabeth Jacobs contend, almost 35 percent of Americans saw themselves as “among the have-nots” in 2008 while “a CEO earned 262 times the pay of the average worker” at roughly the same time, outsourcing and ongoing deindustrialization have only accelerated the growth of low-wage jobs that offer neither security nor benefits.Footnote ²⁸ Labor alienation persists with a vengeance. The financialization of the economy proceeds apace. As Naoko Shibusawa and I have pointed out elsewhere, “capitalism … continues to be a system that forever and even voraciously seeks new places and novel ways to ‘monetise’ … anything and everything.”Footnote ²⁹ As a “tectonic shift in the distribution of income” continues, as commodity fetishism drives people further into debt, as payday loans provide one of few options for many working people facing emergencies, how should we think about recent history?Footnote ³⁰ And how do gender and sexuality matter?

Gender and sexuality have clearly shaped life in both the late twentieth and early twenty-first century United States: from the confluence of attacks on reproductive freedom with federal inaction to the AIDS crisis during the 1980s, from an erosion of the welfare state that witnessed a racialized demonization of welfare mothers to the concentration of women in jobs so poorly remunerated that some of those workers could qualify for food stamps during the 1980s into the 1990s. A “backlash” against feminism emerged as more families became dependent on women's wages: during the first decade of the twenty-first century, some commentators even declared that women workers were more “recession-proof” as working men found themselves experiencing nothing less than a “mancession.”Footnote ³¹ Recent reincarnations of the “Forgotten Man” occasionally account for women, but they tend to focus on the white working class. Despite the reality that “unemployment and poverty rates are substantially higher in African-American, Latino, and Native American communities,” some white working-class men have felt especially aggrieved, disaffected, and displaced during the last decade or so.Footnote ³² These men are “suffer[ing] the costs while being denied the benefits” of capitalism, but so too are working women who engage in contemporary “unregulated home production,” making everything from garments to electrical and computer components while other women perform data entry in “their basements or living rooms.”Footnote ³³ It is hardly incidental that many of these particular workers are recent immigrants.

Many jobs in today's low-wage economy are not only held by people of color—many such jobs are occupied primarily by women as well, including work as hotel maids or domestics, be it for a private employer or for an international franchisor such as Merry Maids.Footnote ³⁴ And, as Barbara Ehrenreich observed in 2001, “the color of the hand that pushes the sponge varies from region to region [in the United States]: Chicanas in the Southwest, Caribbeans in New York, native Hawaiians in Hawaii, native whites, many of recent and rural extraction, in the Midwest[.]” Gender discrimination is a reality within the current low-wage economy, too. At the beginning of this century, for example, women filed an unsuccessful class action suit against Wal-Mart.Footnote ³⁵ As “the number of manufacturing jobs continues to dwindle and the number of service-sector jobs expands,” both immigrant women and women of color face gender discrimination that is profoundly racialized as well.Footnote ³⁶ These working women are pointedly not among the ostensible “power wives” featured in Politico's special issue on the “New Gilded Age”—women who make more than their well-positioned and prominent spouses, and who are arguably in a better position vis-à-vis male partners because “[their] energy and economic drive” actually facilitate if not enable their partners’ careers.Footnote ³⁷

Whether one embraces or rejects the notion of a new Gilded Age, matters pertaining to sex and sexuality have clearly shaped U.S. political culture since the 1980s. Whereas women of color continued to endure sterilization abuse well into the 1970s, the politicization of abortion has dominated considerations of reproductive rights since Roe v. Wade (1973). Certainly, both reproductive technologies and the gay rights movement have transformed the sexual landscape in the United States since the 1960s. But it is also the case that since the Reagan era, “debates about sex, rather than remaining the province of feminists and gay liberationists … polariz[ed] the nation's politics.”Footnote ³⁸ Marital and date rape, as well as sexual harassment, same-sex marriage, gender nonconformity, gay-bashing, and transgender rights are part of our cultural awareness and political discourse in unprecedented ways during the early twenty-first century. Still, it is perhaps true that Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), “abstinence-only education” initiatives during Bush II, the 2006 Federal Marriage Amendment, and the very real threat that abortion rights face in light of the current composition of the Supreme Court, can all make one wonder how far we have actually come since Anthony Comstock.Footnote ³⁹ And, as much as the Gilded Age ostensibly had its own #MeToo Moment,Footnote ⁴⁰ the fact that Brett Kavanaugh could be nominated—and by a man who publicly boasted of wantonly grabbing women's genitals—and then confirmed to the Supreme Court, it is painfully clear that women have yet to achieve full equality on key fronts, that the fallout from the second confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas in 1991 did not alter some men's sense of sexual entitlement.

Catherine Cocks's 2006 observation that, “[t]he contemporary politicization of sexualities has deep roots in the previous fin de siècle” still rings true, but I am nonetheless reluctant to declare that we now find ourselves in a “new,” “second,” or even “third” Gilded Age.Footnote ⁴¹ I do not necessarily share James Livingston's take on capitalism expressed in his 2016 Chronicle of Higher Education essay, “The Myth of a ‘Second Gilded Age,’” yet I find myself persuaded by Livingston's assertion that, “[w]e learn from the past only insofar as we can acknowledge the differences between then and now.”Footnote ⁴² What political possibilities might be generated and sustained if we allow ourselves to reflect upon—and even become vexed by—a question posed by journalist Sarah Jones: “are we really living in a new Gilded Age, or is this just the status quo for America?”Footnote ⁴³

Organized labor undoubtedly weakened over the twentieth century, but domestic workers, fast food employees, farm workers, and other “unskilled” laborers have continued to find ways to organize themselves during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Indeed, Premilla Nadasen is encouraged by contemporary labor movements led by women of color—both documented and not. The decades between the New Deal and the Great Society when the U.S. welfare state expanded may have been “kind of a blip in American history,” but they still point to what can be achieved when both social and economic justice actually inform domestic policy.Footnote ⁴⁴ Social movements driven largely by social media—including #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, and #MeToo—might have their limits; they also have potential to effect meaningful change.

Eco-socialist organizer Kali Akuno maintains that we need “technological innovations to create a regenerative economy.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Such innovation is surely within reach. Activism remains imperative, too. As Annelise Orleck has recently underscored, low-wage workers—many of them women of color—continue to organize on their own behalf against the ravages of global, late-stage capitalism.Footnote ⁴⁶ So, rather than considering our current moment as another Gilded Age, I prefer to think of the radical possibilities that might be produced by a revivified progressive politics—one not bound to replicate the tensions, oversights, and biases of early twentieth-century progressivism. In light of the considerable interest now in histories of capitalism, let us address both intended and collateral damage wrought by capitalism in ways that might inform (or even translate into) social change.