One need not even delve so far as the opening sentence of Bread to uncover Norris's chief social concerns. Norris dedicates his novel to "The Working Women of America." Their struggle for acceptance in the workplace, equal pay, and security as independent people are the principal issues with which Bread concerns itself. In the final analysis, however, the novel appears somewhat ambiguous because Norris also seems anxious about the state of the American home abandoned by the working woman.

While on the one hand a progressive piece arguing for women's equality, Norris's book retains a conservative strain, underscored by the statement on the first edition's jacket-copy that "the vanishing American home may find in these pages a cause and an effect." For the cause, women have his sympathy; they cannot live without bread, and when abandoned by their husbands and families they must secure their living...