78-9).
The implications of that transformation took hold decisively after 1900. As Cooke notes, Theodore Roosevelt, who was president in 1912, "was the first influential man of his time to see clearly that the United States was no longer a rural nation but an industrial giant run amok" (Cooke 299). America, and in particular the American frontier, was one of the "longed-for places" that contained the promise of utopian happiness (Ainsa 119). However, although the operative dynamic was one of change and optimism, the pursuit was not always matched by achievement of happiness.
The same category of pursuit associated with migration in and transformation of society was not, as a practical matter, equally open to men and women during the teens and 1920s. That disconnect between promise and fulfillment, coupled with the unavoidability of wholesale transformation of the social landscape brought on by both immigration and industrialization, provides material for the work of both Willa Cather and William Faulkner. Both Faulkner and Cather look at changes in society brought about by immigration and/or migration as reflected in the experience of women, and their temporal milieu is roughly equivalent. Their emphases are quite different. This may have something to do with the social realities of the period in various parts of the United States. In this regard, Douglas describes the process of what she terms disestablishment or economic dislocation of social, public roles for American women in the course of the nineteenth century, particularly well-bred northern women, increasingly confined to the private sphere of hearth, home, and family. The relevant point here is that, as Douglas says, "for the feminine immigrants who came increasing numbers straight from a ship to a northern sweatshop or a midwestern frontier, for the thousands of enslaved black women who served King Cotton, disestablishment clearly had little or no meaning" (Douglas 49). ...