The Last Leaf

During the early 1900s, O. Henry spent the last eight years of his life in New York, immersed in its populace. He witnessed social as well as gender discrimination and sympathized with poor, ill-fated working women. With the emergence of the Suffrage Movement in the 1890s, more women were drawn to the industrial and urban workforce. This period was characterized not only by efforts to gain the right to vote but also by increasing women-led demands for reform in economics, politics, and social spheres. Women started to gain employment in the late 19th and early 20th century, but the majority of better paying positions went to men. Issues such as women’s right to control their earnings and own property were also up for debate.

In short stories such as “Elsie in New York” and “An Unfinished Story,” Henry’s use of realism illuminates the hardships of the working woman and focuses on how urban poverty challenged women. Henry sympathized with these struggles, presenting a progressive attitude in his depiction of female characters. Henry was generally a champion of feminism, as evidenced by his many progressive female characters. In “The Last Leaf,” Henry leans on the cultural context of the early 1900s in Greenwich Village. Though Greenwich Village was a progressive arts refuge that provided something of an escape from the industrial world, it was not exempt from the sexism of the world at large. In addition, poverty was a common denominator in the area, and the pneumonia epidemic of 1907 spread in the densely populated area.