Flappers and Mothers: New Women in the 1920s

Flappers and Mothers: New Women in the 1920s

Frederick Lewis Allen, in his famous chronicle of the 1920s Only Yesterday, contended that women’s “growing independence” had accelerated a “revolution in manners and morals” in American society (95). The 1920s did bring significant changes to the lives of American women. World War I, industrialization, suffrage, urbanization, and birth control increased women’s economic, political, and sexual freedom. However, with these advances came pressure to conform to powerful but contradictory archetypes. Women were expected to be both flapper and wife, sex object and mother. Furthermore, Hollywood and the emerging “science” of advertising increasingly tied conceptions of femininity to a specific standard of physical beauty attainable by few. By 1930, American women (especially affluent whites) had won newfound power and independence, but still lived in a sexist culture where their gender limited their opportunities and defined their place in society.

World War I and industrialization both brought greater economic autonomy to American women. With immigration curtailed and hundreds of thousands of men needed for the armed forces, women’s labor became a wartime necessity. About 1.5 million women worked in paying jobs during the war, with many more employed as volunteers or secretaries and yeomen for the Army, Navy, and Marines (James and Wells, 66). Women retained few of those 1.5 million jobs after men returned from war, but the United States’ industrialized postwar economy soon provided enough work for men and women alike. Once confined to nursing, social work, teaching, or secretarial jobs, women began to find employment in new fields. According to Allen, “They ...

... middle of paper ...

...r and a dutiful mother. Furthermore, large groups of American women were, by the basis of race or class, automatically excluded from the “new womanhood.” Despite significant advances, the decade of the 1920s ended much as it had began—American women, considered second-rate citizens, struggled to define femininity on their own terms.

Works Cited

Allen, Frederick Lewis. Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-

Twenties. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1931.

D’Emilio, John and Estelle B. Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality

in America. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Goodman, James. Stories of Scottsboro. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.

James, D. Clayton and Anne Sharp Wells. America and the Great War, 1914-

1920. Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1998.

H427 website: http://bss.sfsu.edu/tygiel/Hist427