Flappers and Mothers: New Women in the 1920s Essay -- American History

Flappers and Mothers radical Women in the 1920s Frederick Lewis Allen, in his famous chronicle of the 1920s besides Yesterday, contended that womens growing independence had accelerated a revolution in manners and morals in American society (95). The 1920s did sustain significant changes to the lives of American women. World War I, industrialization, suffrage, urbanization, and birth control change magnitude womens economic, political, and sexual freedom. However, with these advances came pressure to conform to powerful but confounding archetypes. Women were expected to be both flapper and wife, sex object and mother. Furthermore, Hollywood and the rising science of advertising increasingly tied conceptions of femininity to a ad hoc standard of physical beauty attainable by fewer. By 1930, American women (especially affluent whites) had won innovativefound power and independence, but still lived in a sexist culture where their gender limited their opportunities a nd intendd their organize in society. World War I and industrialization both brought great economic autonomy to American women. With immigration curtailed and hundreds of thousands of men needed for the arm forces, womens labor became a wartime necessity. About 1.5 million women worked in paying(a) 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 throttle to nursing, social work, teaching, or secretarial jobs, women began to find employment in new fields. According to Allen, They ... ...r and a dutiful mother. Furthermore, large groups of American women were, by the rear end of race or class, automatically excluded from the new womanhood. Despite significant advances, the ten dollar bill of the 1 920s ended much as it had beganAmerican women, considered second-rate citizens, struggled to define femininity on their own terms.Works CitedAllen, Frederick Lewis. Only Yesterday An free-and-easy History of the Nineteen-Twenties. unexampled York Harper & Brothers, 1931.DEmilio, 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