The role of American women started to change completely during 1920s. In this paper, I will follow is to identify how American women’s role have changed, describe their difficulties and compare the experiences of Asian American women and African American women.
When the United States entered World War I in 1917, millions of men were sent to join allied forces and many jobs were lack of labors. In the meantime, the war led high deaths and injuries. Therefore, most women had started to take a role to manage families and took the place of men and their jobs as men had gone for flight during the war. According to a research (Consena and Rubio, n.d. P.156), women usually recruited and worked in dangerous job positions, such as air flight, dangerous
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munitions manufacturing, railway guards and tram conductors. Plus, technological innovation developed during 1920s, it required more labors to boost the economy. So, more and more women had started to work outside their homes. According to a study, the number of working women rose to 25% (Women in the 1920s, n.d.). Even after World War I, men came back from the war and took back their jobs positions, some women were still staying in the workforce. Moreover, many employers continued to hire women rather than men for jobs. It was because they were usually paid lesser than men and willing to work. So, there were more job opportunities available, such as nurse, secretaries and teachers. In addition, there were more and women received education. According to a data from an organization, the number of women attended college had increased to 10% (Women in the 1920s, n.d.). Receiving education contributed independent mind and aspiration. They created “flapper culture”, which was a new sign to reflect young Western females refined themselves to a lifestyle as reckless by wearing bobbed hair, short skirts, makeup, smoked, got drunk in public and casually dated (Consena and Rubio, n.d. P.157). However, American women suffered discrimination during 1920s, especially after World War I and before the ratification of 19th Amendments. They were viewed as a minor role that should not deserve the right to vote. It is because it was not within their intellectual capacity to have opinion and judgment in an election. Women who involved in politics were also viewed as should not have children and get married, as known as Race Suicide Argument. Therefore, gender status became a debatable women suffrage challenge. In 1920s, American women adapted a new look, which was flapper in order to break out of tradition roles and support independence and gender equality. Later, the National Women’s Party proposed an amendment. The amendment was created towards the prohibition on gender discrimination and gender equality. It was finally ratified on August 26, 1920 and it extended the rights of women suffrage. They started to get more jobs opportunity, played sports, created unique fashion styles, such as bathing suits and looser clothing. Yet, women started to feel their purpose in society. Asian American women and African American women were treated differently but faced similar difficulties during 1920s.
Asian Americans were viewed as one of the minority groups. During the period of early 1920s, the number of Asian immigrants rose. As many Asian women married aliens for naturalized citizenship. Also, Asians were took over white jobs, causing hatred and social unrest. Therefore, a series of strict and harsh immigration laws targeted to Asians and therefore many Asians women faced a lot of social issues such as discrimination, gender identity and their precarious civic status in a vulnerable society before and during 1920s. For instances. The immigration Act of 1921 and 1924 were introduced and it created another restriction on immigration by forming a stricter quota system. The main purpose of The Acts was to guarantee that they would never qualify for land ownership or naturalization. Meanwhile, in 1922, the Supreme Court declared that Japanese were ineligible for citizenship. Until the Immigration Act of 1924, all Asians were denied to entry the United States. Under the harsh restrictions, many Asians did not receive equal education opportunities and they usually worked as unskilled laborer. Most Asian women, including merchants’ wives worked in shops, canneries, laundries and maintaining the home in the United States. Moreover, they worked as prostitution and paid with copper pennies. However, since many restrictions targeted Asians, they suffered from the …show more content…
competition of getting a job. Jade Snow Wong (1922-2006) who was a Chinese American autobiographer that revealed the her and her family endured the hardship of racism and how she experienced her life in a strict accordance. Moreover, African American and Mexican American women suffered similar situation as Asian American women.
African American were also living in poor condition but they then moved to cities in the North from Southeastern states. However, life was also hard, as housing was poor and jobs were often hard to find. Besides, they were also mistreated by the whites. When 19th Amendment ratified by the US Constitution, Southern African Americans women were effectively disenfranchised. However, compare with Asians women, African American women were highly active in engaging suffrage movements and participated in National Women Suffrage Association to fight for the right of vote and gaining economic opportunities. Whilst, Asian American women were tended to attach importance to family. On the other hand, there were also more Mexican American women immigrated from Mexico to Texas in the first decade of the twentieth century. In the 1920s, most Mexican women also worked inside of the home. Even they worked outside of the home, they were often scorned and mistreated as Asian American
women. In addition, these changes in 1920s had allowed women to break out of traditional roles and entered a new position to support troops overseas and home front. They started to gain the right to vote, more job opportunities and grew independence. Even women with different ethnicity suffered the issues of discrimination, they had refined themselves and led to new lifestyle and social value in the 1920s in the United States.
The deeply rooted history of a Confucian paradigm in Korea has for long limited women’s roles and rights. In the male-dominated and patriarchal society, women’s roles remained in the domestic sphere, where they were required to be submissive. However, with the introduction of westernization and modernity in the 1920s, modern generation was rapidly incorporated into colonial modernity. Korean women began to “redefine the Korean female identity” by displaying the “new woman” characteristics, in which some literate women initiated to “enhance their education, determine their own physical appearance, and contribute to the debate about changing gender roles and expectations”(Yoo, p.59) Fearing the threat of the emergence of the “new women” with the potential disturbance to the hegemony, Japanese colonial authorities as well as nationalist reformers veered the direction where the new ideologies of womanhood with modern sensibilities, also contained them within traditional gender boundaries, such as in education and social spheres(Yoo, 60). Park Kyung Won, the main female character in the film Blue Swallow, also lived during this era of the “new women” as well as restrictions under the Japanese colonial rule. In the film Blue Swallow, while her father encouraged her to stay at home for her to fit into the role of the traditional women, Park works as a taxi driver and eventually studies abroad to attend Tachikawa Flight academy, where she becomes the first civilian Korean female pilot. She displays the “new women” image, in which like the other “new women”, she does not conform to the traditional norms of a woman and strives in redefining the Korean female identity. However, her engagement in male-dominated education and profession, “ma...
During the war, women played a vital role in the workforce because all of the men had to go fight overseas and left their jobs. This forced women to work in factories and volunteer for war time measures.
All in all, American suffragists sacrificed their time and risked their lives just to claim themselves the right that they should be given for long time ago. The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920 which give American women a voice in politics by voting. Following the ratification was the time of World War II that gave women opportunity to get back to the work force. Men were being sent out to war, women were recruited actively in working forces. Despite the contribution of women to the war, they were still seen as secondary to men. Because of that, the hope for equality in gender in the United States grew even stronger after World War II.
As many women took on a domestic role during this era, by the turn of the century women were certainly not strangers to the work force. As the developing American nation altered the lives of its citizens, both men and women found themselves struggling economically and migrated into cities to find work in the emerging industrialized labor movement . Ho...
Women’s role in society changed quite a bit during WWI and throughout the 1920s. During the 1910s women were very short or liberty and equality, life was like an endless rulebook. Women were expected to behave modestly and wear long dresses. Long hair was obligatory, however it always had to be up. It was unacceptable for them to smoke and they were expected to always be accompanied by an older woman or a married woman when outing. Women were usually employed with jobs that were usually associated with their genders, such as servants, seamstresses, secretaries and nursing. However during the war, women started becoming employed in different types of jobs such as factory work, replacing the men who had gone to fight in the war in Europe. In the late 1910s The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) had been fighting for decades to get the vote for women. As women had contributed so much to the war effort, it was difficult to refuse their demands for political equality. As a result, the Nineteenth Amendment to the constitution became law in 19...
Because many men were involved in the war, women finally had their chance to take on many of the positions of a man. Some women served directly in the military and some served in volunteer agencies at home and in France. For a brief period, from 1917 to 1918, one million women worked in industry. Others not involved in the military and industry engaged in jobs such as streetcar conductors and bricklayers. But as the war started to end, women lost their jobs to the returning veterans.
The 1940s provided a drastic change in women’s employment rates and society’s view of women. With the end of the Depression and the United States’ entrance into World War II, the number of jobs available to women significantly increased. As men were being drafted into military service, the United States needed more workers to fill the jobs left vacant by men going to war. Women entered the workforce during World War II due to the economic need of the country. The use of Patriotic rhetoric in government propaganda initiated and encouraged women to change their role in society.
During America’s involvement in World War Two, which spanned from 1941 until 1945, many men went off to fight overseas. This left a gap in the defense plants that built wartime materials, such as tanks and other machines for battle. As a result, women began to enter the workforce at astonishing rates, filling the roles left behind by the men. As stated by Cynthia Harrison, “By March of [1944], almost one-third of all women over the age of fourteen were in the labor force, and the numbers of women in industry had increased almost 500 percent. For the first time in history, women were in the exact same place as their male counterparts had been, even working the same jobs. The women were not dependent upon men, as the men were overseas and far from influence upon their wives.
In response to the World War I for the following years from the flow of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Congress of United States passed a law to limit immigrations, which named Immigration Act of 1924 or the Johnson-Reed Act. The Immigration Act of 1924 was an Act use to limit the big number of immigration entry to the United States. The Immigration Act of 1924 only provided two percent immigration visas from 1980s national census. Asians were not allowed to immigrate to the United States.
The role of American women has changed significantly from the time the nation was born, to the modern era of the 1950s and 1960s. Many people, "... believed that women's talent and energies ... would be put to the better [use] in the new republic." (Clinton 3) Clearly showing that society has seen the importance of the women's talents and that their skills can be very useful, exploited this and thus, the change of the women's role was inevitable. Society has understood that the roles of women played an important role on all parts of life.
Women began to speak out against the laws that were deliberately set against them. Throughout this time period, women were denied the right to vote in all federal and most state held elections. Women struggled to achieve equality; equality as citizens, equality in the work place, and equality at home. During this time, Americans worked to fight corruption in government, reduce the power of big business, and improve society as a whole.
During World War I, many men were drafted away from their families to fight for America. The men left an excess of jobs available for women to take. These jobs were not just an option but also a necessary responsibility to support their family, while their husbands were at war. In the absence of many men, women wore shorter skirts for functionality, learned to drive cars, and cut their hair. It is believed that because of the shortage of qualified men, women became more aggressive towards them, demonstrating behavior of a “Flapper” ("Flappers." Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion”) World War 1 gave women a taste of what it was like to earn a living outside of the house and they liked the independence. When the men came back from the war, women were not so eager to give it up. Also, the war had wiped out a number of males, not only leaving more jobs available for women, but also leaving wives and...
In chapter thirty five, author Shelley Sang-Hee Lee explains that “Immigration is an important part of our understanding of U.S. social experience” (Hee 128). Asian immigrants bring their diverse culture, language and custom from various Asian countries. They help improve American economic development. Also, they play an important role in American society. The first Asian immigration flow is the Chinese Immigration in the mid-19th century to work in the gold mines and railroads. The Asian immigrant population grew rapidly between 1890 and 1910 (Hee 130). The increasing of population of Asian immigrants have brought a lot of problems. Many of them were facing the issue of ethnicity, discrimination, and the process of assimilation. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which banned the immigration of Chinese laborers and proscribed foreign-born Chinese from naturalized citizenship and the Asian Exclusion Act League in 1907 which limited the entry of Asian immigrants have reshaped the demographic of Asian immigrants in the U.S (Hing 45). With the rise of anti-Asian movements, many Asian immigrants were rejected from entering America or deported to their homeland. In the early history of immigration in America, the issue of deportation is an important part of the Asian American experience in the
“Women’s roles were constantly changing and have not stopped still to this day.” In the early 1900s many people expected women to be stay at home moms and let the husbands support them. But this all changes in the 1920s, women got the right to vote and began working from the result of work they have done in the war. Altogether in the 1920s women's roles have changed drastically.
The earliest form of racial discrimination against Asian Americans was encountered during the California Gold Rush. The Gold Rush attracted Chinese immigrants who came to California to fill the high demand for laborers. However, as more and more Chinese immigrated to California and the lower-paying labor jobs were filled, the Chinese began filling higher-paying positions typically held by Whites. As a result, an anti-Chinese Movement was formed followed by the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which prevented any additional Chinese immigration into the United States. Essentially, Chinese were discriminated against by the Whites due to fear of the Chinese taking over their jobs. After World War II, the federal government ended the 1882 ban on Chinese immigration and gave citizenship to Chinese Americans born abroad (Charles and Guryan 507).