How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Women were stouter then. They visited the fleet carrying white parasols. Everyone wore white in summer. [...] Across America sex and death were barely distinguishable. Runaway women died in the rigors of ecstasy. Stories were hushed up and reporters paid off by rich families. One read between the lines of the journals and gazettes. (1.1)
This is the world as we enter it at the beginning of Ragtime, and yet, as you can tell by the language, things have already started to change. The trial of Harry K. Thaw will mark that change, as the scandalous testimony of Evelyn Nesbit leaves little to the imagination, creating in her America's first sex symbol.
Quote #2
In fact Sigmund Freud had just arrived in America to give a series of lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and so Houdini was destined to be, with Al Jolson, the last of the great shameless mother lovers, a nineteenth-century movement that included such men as Poe, John Brown, Lincoln and James McNeill Whistler. (5.9)
Here Doctorow points out that the ideas of one individual—in this case Freud—can be responsible for an entire shift in thinking. Freud's ideas about a mother's effect on their sons, specifically ideas like the Oedipal complex, would give negative connotations to close mother/son relationships.
Quote #3
America was a great farting country. All this began to change when Taft moved into the White House. His accession to the one mythic office in the American imagination weighed everyone down. [...] Thereafter fashion would the other way and only poor people would be stout. (11.1)
Presidents can change society, just by how they look and dress. When Kennedy became President and didn't wear a hat, men stopped wearing hats. Doctorow points out a similar thing with Taft, who weighed 332 pounds. Once people saw all that girth, they started trying to be thinner.