For some reason Trolly talking about turn of century America made me think of an English novel by Zoe Fairbairns called 'Stand We At last'.

http://www.enotes.com/contemporary-literary-criticism/fairbairns-zoe-ann

Zoë (Ann) Fairbairns 1948–

English novelist.

Fairbairns is a feminist writer whose novels examine from both a historical and a contemporary perspective the inequalities and difficulties women have faced. She has been commended for creating strong characters, male and female, who reflect women's struggles, and for avoiding being didactic or simplistic.

Benefits (1976) is a futuristic story set in the closing years of the twentieth century, when women are subject to compulsory birth control. As an Orwellian government attempts to institutionalize motherhood, selective breeding begins and women's role in society is vastly reduced. Benefits has been praised as a meaningful political fable, and Fairbairns is recognized for her skill in balancing her characters.

Stand We at Last (1983) has been called Fairbairns's most accomplished novel. This work follows five generations of English women through their struggles to gain personal and political freedom. Elizabeth Grossman asserted that Fairbairns tried to cover too many topics and failed to explore the passing time periods in depth, but other critics applauded Fairbairns's historical research and declared that Stand We at Last was a convincing portrait of women's issues over the last hundred years.

http://www.zoefairbairns.co.uk/novels.htm

STAND WE AT LAST
This family saga, first published in 1983 and still available through print-on-demand, follows five generations of women, from the mid-19th century to the 1970s. "Travels a long way in time and space. gives a resume of the last hundred years of women's struggle for emancipation, while telling a rattling good tale." (Times Literary Supplement)

http://www.briefbio.com/pages/4304/Fairbairns-Zo-Ann.html

Despite her preoccupation with the present lot of women, Fairbairns seems more at home when writing about the future or the past. Nowhere is this more evident than in Stand We at Last, perhaps the most ambitious of her novels. In her own words "a family saga with a feminist background," it traces the lives of a succession of women, starting in 1855 with the adventurous Sarah who emigrates to Australia hoping to make her fortune as a farmer, and ending with Jackie, a single parent living on a hippie commune in 1970s England. As in her other books, the writer remains true to the genre she has chosen: all of Life is present in this 600-page saga—births, suicides, miscarriages, abortions, raised hopes, dashed ambitions—not to mention love, passion, and sexual guilt. But this is no ordinary rags-to-riches saga; as in all Fairbairns's novels, ambitions are spiritual rather than material; children and men seem to be the rocks on which women's ambitions founder; and in order to break out of the cycle set up by her predecessors, the modern heroine must give up her man rather than get him in the end.