The Feminization of American Culture seeks to explain the values prevalent in today's mass culture by tracing them back to their roots in the Victorian era. As religion lost its hold on the public mind, clergymen and educated women, powerless and insignificant in the society of the time, together profoundly affected the only areas open to their influence, the arts and literature, and women wrote books that idealized the very qualities that kept them powerless - timidity, piety, and a disdain for competition. These sentimental values continue to influence modern culture, preoccupied as it is with glamour, banal melodrama, and mindless consumption.