By the 1920s, the United States of America was beginning to gain a reputation for equality and social democracy. This was a period of significant change for women. The 19th amendment was passed in 1920, giving women the right to vote, and women began to pursue both family life and careers of their own. In the political and business worlds, women competed with men; in marriage, they moved toward a contractual role. Many accounts attributed numerous characteristics to the “New Women” of the 1920s: their manners and morals differed from those of previous generations. Though social commenters saw measures of emancipation, they still believed social equality had not been reached and women were still not being treated as equal. Social Scientists …show more content…
disagreed on what roles they thought women should play in society so there was no one recommendation for the new woman in the 1920's. During this time, women’s legal and economic position had improved for the first time in history women had perhaps become the social and economic equals of men. Concepts of modern womanhood and fashion were redefined by what was called a flapper.
The new woman desired the same freedom of movement that men had and the same political and economic rights. By the end of 1920, she had come a long way. Before the war a lady did not step foot in a bar; after the war she entered as thoughtlessly as she would go to a railroad station. Women had entered the workforce during the war, yet now they were urged to return home. The idea of a working woman was not supported, no one wanted competition, but some still remained. During this time period, young women began to attend large state colleges and universities, and also to claim their own bodies, taking part in a sexual liberation movement of their generation. As shown in “Clara Bow, the Original “It” Girl”, we see how the new woman began to show cleavage, wear make-up, and style her hair. This had become the age of the flapper: a new breed of young women in the 1920s who wore shorter skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to jazz, and flaunted their disdain for socially acceptable behavior by wearing makeup, smoking, driving automobiles, and flouting sexual …show more content…
norms. Although women were given freedom and respect to a certain extent, it wasn’t as sweet as it seemed to be. While an increasing number of women worked, they were strictly restricted in their range of employment, and the pay was significantly lower than men. This is shown in, "Alice Rogers Hager on Men's and Women's Factory Pay in the Mid-1920's," a man is paid between ten and fifteen dollars more than a woman. Unfortunately, Jobs were given to men over women with the same education. A professor’s wife states, “After an expenditure of several thousand dollars and the devotion of some of the best years of my life to a special study, I was cut off from any opportunity to utilize this training”. This woman and her husband shared the same level of education, a Ph.D, but because he was a man he was afforded a job and she was not. She was forced to stay home and do a job that women without an education could do. During this time period, many women seemed to be content with working in the home while social scientist argued that they were capable of more. John Watson argued, “I have never believed that there were any unsuperable difficulties which keep women from succeeding.” He believed that a woman was capable of coming to the front, but she was weak. Women became comfortable in the state they were placed in, and for most women marriage left them there. Therefore, suffrage seemed to “disappear from politics.” Some women became content with the exception of “the doctrinaire type” who pressed for equal rights.
Women's history was reverting to being only about home, fashions, and sex. Women seemed to come under the pressure of being a housekeeper or a flapper during this time. The few married women who were able to get in business were not looked at as professional, colleagues looked at them as if their one and only priority were their homes. “The married woman was expected to jump up and run home the moment her husband caught a cold or the children came home ill from school.” Jobs that would hire women wanted flappers while married women were the subjects of ridicule. Housekeeping was looked at as some sort of trade, “ ... and what you do will be passed on, and help build up a great mass of proved knowledge on housekeeping.” Women were expected to follow a schedule on how their house should be run. Some social scientist was against this view though, arguing that when a man comes home he should be asked to take out the garbage or hold the baby, not sit down and be catered
too. Women in the 1920s began to be presented as flappers, more concerned with clothing and sex than with politics. Women had rejected political emancipation and found sexual freedom. Social scientists’ evaluations reported few substantial gains for women during this time. Though the 19th Amendment was put in place, a lot of women did not utilize their right to the same extent as men. Women had seemingly had turned to government and educational institutions for basis of emancipation, but they had not as yet been successful in obtaining political power. Social scientist recommended women ultimately focus on being a housewife. They counseled women on how to act- in relationships, the workplace, and their homes. These experts, however, often disagreed about how or even whether changes in women roles should occur. Some social scientist wrote books instructing women how to have happy marriages and be a great housewife. Lillian M. Gilbreth says, “Home-making is the world’s finest job in the world, and it is the aim of this book to make it as interesting and satisfying as it is important.” Here she is expressing the importance of being a housewife and homeworker, insinuating that there is no better job for a woman. During the 1920's the Women's Movement failed to make a few changes to women at home and the workforce, but they did accomplish some with morals and divorce. The “new woman” of the 1920s rejected the pieties and often the politics of the older generation, smoked and drank in public, celebrated the sexual revolution, and embraced consumer culture. While earlier generations had debated suffrage, political discussions of feminism were seldom the stuff of popular media in the 1920s. Women at home continued to do the same jobs as before, staying home and being mothers and homemakers. In the workforce, women still received lower wages than men, and most women were confined to more “feminine jobs”. Women's morals now changed, they revolted against sexual restrictions. Society assumed that the role of woman was to be wife and mother, part of the trend toward showing women as not perfectly equal to men, but special and different from them, with different needs and concerns.
From coast to coast people were reading the exploits of a new type of woman called flapper. Prior to World War 1 Victorian ideals still dictated the behavior of American women and girls. Frederick Lewis Allen describes the traditional role of women. Women were the guardians of morality. They were made of finer stuff than men. They were expected to act accordingly. Young girls must look forward in innocence to a romantic love match which would lead them to the altar and to living happily ever after. Until the right man came along they must allow no male to kiss them. Flappers did the opposite. Flappers danced the Charleston, kissed their boyfriends while they played golf and sat behind the wheels of fast cars. The liberated usually young female disdained the traditions of her mother and grandmother before her. Flappers would smoke and drink alcohol, she cut her hair and wore short dresses. They also changed their views on courtship rituals, marriage, and child rearing. With these they could have the same freedom as men could. The time period also saw a highly physical change in women’s lives like how they dressed and looked. For the first time in American history women could choose to be free from long hair and voluminous clothing. Before the women changed they wore very restrictive clothing consisting of long skirts with layers of petticoats over tightly laced corsets that produced an hourglass figure with wide hips and a narrow waist.
In the 19th century women began to take action to change their rights and way of life. Women in most states were incapable to control their own wages, legally operate their own property, or sign legal documents such as wills. Although demoted towards their own private domain and quite powerless, some women took edge and became involved in parts of reform such as temperance and abolition. Therefore this ultimately opened the way for women to come together in an organized movement to battle for their own rights in such ways as equal education, labor, legal reform, and the occupations. As stated in the nineteenth amendment, a constitutional revision that established women’s citizen rights to vote.
Some people hated this idea of the Flapper and they blamed the war for these women’s new behaviors. After World War I, young women and young girls started to act free and go against their families. “Some people in society blamed the war for triggering this rebellion of youth and they claimed it had upset the balance of the sexes and, in particular, confuse women of their role in society and where they truly belonged” (Grouley 63). Some people hated the idea of the flappers and these women had become. These women, the flappers, in the 1920s felt free after the 19th amendment was passed. “Since the early twentieth century, the sexual habits of these American women had changed in profound ways” (Zeitz 21). Flappers drank, partied, and had romantic evenings with men. All of which were illegal for women. In addition, they were an embarrassment to society and they were able to get away with anything. “Flappers were a disgrace to society because they were lazy-pleasure seekers who were only interested in drinking, partying, and flirting” (Dipalo 1). For instance, Flappers went to clubs, drank, and hung out with men and were too lazy to do anything. Therefore, one consequence of the war was the creation of a new woman and this led to a movement like no other.
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...
War is often followed by change; World War I is no exception. World War I is often labeled the cause for the rise of a feminine revolution-“the flapper”. Before the term “flapper” began to describe the “young independently-minded woman of the early Twenties” (Mowry 173), the definition that is most prominent today, it had a 300-year long history. The young woman of the 1920’s was new and rebellious. In her appearance and demeanor, she broke the social constructs of her society.
Women in the 1930 were a significant part of everyday life, they just did not get credit for it. Women were not recognized for all that they did because men were put on a pesistool. The inequality in this time period affected everything women did. Women were important in American history because of their family roles, careers, and wages.
...wo decades was that in the 1920’s women’s rights advocates were able to pass the 19th amendment, granting women suffrage, and increasing political interest among women. Both time periods were difficult ones for minorities and women, though some victories were had.
In the early 1900’s, women who were married main jobs were to care for her family, manage their houses, and do housework. That is where the word housewife was come from. During the 1940's, women's roles and expectations in society were changing quickly and a lot. Before, women had very limited say in society. Since unemployment was so high during the Great Depression, most people were against women working because they saw it as women taking jobs from men that needed to work. Women were often stereotyped to stay home, have babies, and to be a good wife and mother. Advertisements often targeted women, showing them in the kitchen, talking with children, serving dinner, cleaning, and them with the joy of a clean house or the latest kitchen appliance.
After World War I America became the world’s center for trade. The economic center of the world moved from London, England to New York City, New York, United States of America, and more specifically Wall Street (Buhle, Mari J, Czitzrom, Armitage 848). Due to women, the 1920’s marked economic and social change in America. Women took over men’s jobs during the war while their husbands were overseas, and once the men came home the women wanted to keep their positions. To show gratitude to these women Congress passed the 19th Amendment on August 18th, 1920 which prohibited any United States citizen from having the right to vote based on sex. This change in women’s social status led to more workers in the factories, which were usi...
Many middle class and elite women followed the same thinking pattern of most men in the nineteenth century that women should focus on preserving their morality, improving society, and being domestic subservient wives (lecture). This ideal of true womanhood directly conflicted with working class women’s definition of womanhood and the changing work patterns in the United States. Because middle class and elite woman did not view working women as “true women,” these women often ostracized working class women, which caused tension and increased class divisions (lecture). Additionally, this class rift between women most likely contributed to the slow progress of the women’s rights movement that began in the later half of the nineteenth century. As men were reluctant to accept the shifting definitions of womanhood, many middle class and elite women were also hesitant to accept these changes and began to relate to lower class women in a more hostile
“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.
Time flew by and as the war ended in 1918, the 1920’s decade of change soon approached. The year was famously known as “The Jazz Age” and “The Roaring 20’s” because of the newly found freedom, social and political changes, and the time of prohibition. Among these powerful new changes was the freedom that women were finally able to vote and enjoy what was about to come. Instead of being confined at home, the women joined labor forces, worked with wages, and experimented with different types of behavior that would have been unreasonable a few years back. Along with these dramatic changes were their fashion styles. This style changed their rights and relationships with others completely. With that change, a new woman was born. There were not many ways for women to stand up for themselves and what they believed in. They had no voice but in the 1920’s, women found a way of freely expressing themselves and changing their relationships with others all with the start of fashion.
Women of the 1920's Women during the 1920's lifestyle, fashion, and morals were very different than women before the 1920's. Flappers became the new big thing after the 19th amendment was passed. Women's morals were loosened, clothing and haircuts got shorter, and fashion had a huge role in these young women. Women before the 1920's were very different from the women of the Roarin' 20's. Gwen Hoerr Jordan stated that the ladies before the 1920's wore dresses that covered up most of their skin, had pinned up long hair, were very modest, had chaperones and had men make all of their decisions (1).
Constantly serving as a critical topic of discussion throughout centuries of history, the celebration of women’s rights and the steps taken to achieve this ideal around different regions of the world has set the foundation for the perceptions of females today. In the United States, women’s rights conferences were held as early as the mid-1800s and entirely manifested into a movement in the 1920s when women were officially granted suffrage, or the right to vote in political elections, at a national level. Along with utilizing this newly gained privilege to have their voices be heard in political affairs, women also began to taking steps to be seen in society too, adopting the styles and mannerisms of a flapper – a young, fashionable American
The 20th century brought a tidal wave of tolerance and equal rights for a diverse variety of people in the United States. When the century opened, women did not have an equal position with their male counterparts either in the public or private sectors of society. Women first received their right to vote with the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920, and the beginnings of an equal footing in the workplace during the obligatory utilization of American women as factory employees during the Second World War. Similarly, African Americans spent the 1950's and 60's fighting for their own basic civil rights that had been denied them, such as going to the school or restaurant of their choice. Or something as simple and unpretentious as where they were allowed to sit on a bus.