Primary Sources: The 1910's: Literature

"Pulp magazines (often referred to as "the pulps"), also collectively known as pulp fiction, refers to inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 through the 1950s."

"Settlement houses first began appearing in the immigrant and working-class districts of American cities in the 1890s. Over the next four decades, immigrant men and women had a wide range of experiences with settlement house reformers. Some immigrants encountered the settlement houses as places of refuge and caring; at other times, they found reformers to be arrogant and patronizing. Born in Russian Poland around 1885, Anzia Yesierska came to America as a young girl in the 1890s. She rejected the traditional notions of womanhood and marriage dictated by her Jewish immigrant family. She toiled in sweatshops and laundries while she taught herself English and began writing. She married twice but both unions were brief. In her first story, “The Free Vacation House,” published in 1915, Yesierska painted the middle-class reformers who tried to help the immigrant heroine as meddling busybodies who disregarded her right to dignity and privacy." GMU History Matters