Like many of their contemporaries, both Dorothy Whitney and Willard Straight had, when younger, tried to change the world they knew, and they both succeeded within limits. Both established reform projects that addressed the relations between powerful and powerless classes of people and aimed at the ultimate independence of dependent classes. Neither found the limits on their activities satisfying and so both sought new ways of achieving the changes they desired. They found that marriage to each other afforded them, if only for a time, the chance to forge a partnership dedicated to the transformation of social relations.