Using a corpus of millions of digitized books, we document the presence and trajectory over time of stereotypical gender associations in the written English language from 1800 to 2000. We employ the novel methodology of word embeddings to quantify Male Gender Bias – the tendency to associate a domain with the male gender. We measure Male Gender Bias in four stereotypically gendered domains: career, family, science, and arts. We find that stereotypical gender associations in language have decreased over time, but still remain, with career and science terms demonstrating positive Male Gender Bias, and family and arts terms demonstrating negative Male Gender Bias. We also seek evidence of changing associations corresponding to second shift ideology and find partial support. Latent within the text of published English-language books is the gender ideology of modern society, and the magnitude of gendered associations appears to be decreasing over time.