Why are women in Ragtime attracted by girls?

Ragtime features women who find themselves strongly drawn to other, often younger, female characters–Mother to Sarah, Evelyn to the Little Girl, and Emma Goldman to Evelyn. This drives them to help these girls to the best of their capacity, which comes in various forms: Mother taking in Sarah and her son, Evelyn mothering the Little Girl, Emma taking off Evelyn’s corset, and opening her eyes to freedom. The level of love and care that these women express exceeds reactions to simple pity, especially when considering the intensity of emotions and the personal sacrifices that encompass their actions. 

This got me interested in answering the why: what would have led these women to develop such a strong bond with the girls, who were complete strangers to them until they first met?

Perhaps it is companionship. In all three cases, the women are revealed to share similarities with the girl that they are attracted to. For instance, Evelyn and the Little Girl are both isolated and lonely. Evelyn doesn’t have anyone to genuinely care for her and protect her (remember that her mother had basically sold her away to Thaw by letting him take Evelyn to Germany), and scarcely has anyone to talk to except for Stanford–“She needed desperately to talk to someone and the only person she had ever been able to talk to was the man for whose death she was directly responsible” (86). Similarly, the Little Girl is found physically confined to her father in the streets, left alone with no friends or mother. Additionally, Evelyn notices her similarity to the Little Girl’s mother, further deepening the parallels between the lives of the two characters: “Evelyn felt a strong kinship with the departed mother” (48). Resemblances are also noticeable between Evelyn and Emma. They had both engaged in (or attempted to engage in) sexual activity for money/status and both come from pauper backgrounds, with Evelyn growing up “playing in the streets of a Pennsylvania coal town” (22) and Emma being an immigrant. Lastly, we have Mother and Sarah. In the scene before she digs up Sarah’s baby, Mother recounts her teenage years in Ohio and feels “furious with herself for the nostalgia that swept through her without warning” (67). In their initial encounter, it is Sarah’s youth that captivates Mother: “Mother was shocked by her youth. She had a child’s face, a guileless brown beautiful face” (70). In the context of Mother’s nostalgia, this may suggest that Mother sees a reflection of her younger self in Sarah. It could thus be that, through seeing parts of themselves in the girls, Mother, Evelyn, and Emma had developed a protectiveness toward them.  

At this point, however, it is worth returning to how instantaneously the women form their attachment toward the girls; they are enchanted the moment that they see them, all before they have gotten to know them deeply enough to fully identify their similarities. There is a component to their attraction that isn’t fully justified by shared life experiences. This ambiguity is best illustrated when Emma tells Evelyn, “From the beginning I found myself admiring you. I couldn’t understand why” (56). As a socialist revolutionary, Emma is living a life opposite that of Evelyn, the wife of a wealthy aristocrat, yet somehow happens to “admire” her. Their differences make their connection appear sudden and unnatural, with no precedent to make their instantaneous attraction seem reasonable. The same logic extends to Evelyn and the Little Girl and Mother and Sarah, who had never met each other and come from entirely different worlds. 

Is Doctrow intentionally inserting these inexplicable attractions as a mere device of metafiction, wherein their awkwardness hints at the fictionality of the novel? Or, is this a realistic reflection of certain ways in which total strangers recognize each other in the real world–an analog to love at first sight, or perhaps fate? 

In the novel, Emma Goldman explicitly introduces the idea of destiny in her dialogue with Evelyn: “But there are correspondences, you see, our lives correspond, our spirits touch each other like notes in harmony, and in the total human fate, we are sisters…She stood and touched Nesbit’s face. Do you see that, my beautiful girl?” (61). Perhaps there is some real supernatural “fate” that connects people who were meant to “harmonize”, letting the spirits of the individuals touch each other before their own minds fully register their correspondence. 

So, is it that the characters, by the act of fate, instinctively noticed each other the moment they met? Is there no further explanation of it other than that it was “meant to be”, by the design of the author? As one last thought, it’s interesting to note that all three women notice beauty in the girls. Mother, as mentioned in an earlier quote, empathetically notes the “beautiful face” of Sarah (70); Evelyn calls the Little Girl “the most beautiful child” she had ever seen (42); Emma addresses Evelyn as “my beautiful girl” (61). It’s been noted in other parts of the book how the appearance of the characters reflects their inner status–Tateh had dramatically aged into a “mad old man” after he had ousted his wife (43); Even sees her beauty declining after the divorce, “She [Evelyn] had no joy. She looked into the mirror and saw the unmistakable lineaments of womanhood coming into her girlish face. Her beautiful neck seemed to her like an ungainly stalk…” (88). Then, could it be that the beauty of the girls served as an indicator of their spiritual connection? Or am I just rambling nonsense?