Morality In The 1920's

What happens when morality is thrown away and forgotten by future generations? In the 1920’s, America was still recovering from WWI. Many young men died in WWI and the ones that survived the war were suffering from PTSD. They could not escape their own minds which was their own jail. With the recovery of the war, people had a new sense of living while they are young and pursue drinking, sex, and other pleasures that were originally publically and morally viewed as wrong, but it was all changing. Sheila Liming saw this change and stated it like this, “The post-war years saw the banishment of the victorian hourglass archetype - a move which, on the surface, appears consistent with the logic of female emancipation, and with multi-national fights for women’s suffrage during this period” (Liming 109). She stated clearly the change throughout the generations. What caused the change? Because of the horrors of WWI, women in the 1920s rejected the moral codes of the previous generations by embracing hedonism and pursuing gender equality. This resulted in the wide acceptance of women From 1914-1918, America was involved in a devastating war named WWI. The U.S., at this time, was somewhat unfamiliar to wars. It was like a baby

Burton explains the image of a woman in the 1920s like this, “Held’s woman was a skinny figure, body contorted in the throes of the latest dance, lips holding a dangling cigarette, with short skirt and short hair” (Burton 388). Women were embracing their rebellion, they were showing off their bodies in different ways that women in the previous generations had not done in a very long time. They were smoking, drinking, and pursuing their pleasures. The women in that period must have done it out of spite, as well as for themselves, against men. They probably loved the new attention they received, when they may have been ignored by society. Even if they knew what they were doing was wrong, they most likely loved the thrill of taking a new