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

Flappers and Mothers New Wo workforce in the 1920s Frederick Lewis Allen, in his famous chronicle of the 1920s lone(prenominal) Yesterday, contended that womens growing independence had accelerated a revolution in manners and morals in American society (95). The 1920s did bring material changes to the lives of American women. World War I, industrialization, suffrage, urbanization, and birth control increased womens 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 smasher 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 sexual urge 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, womens 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 maintained 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 captive 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 basis of raceway or class, automatically excluded from the new womanhood. Despite significant advances, the decade of the 1920s 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 Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties. New 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