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

Flappers and Mothers in the altogether Women in the twenties Frederick Lewis Allen, in his famous chronicle of the 1920s Only Yesterday, cont stop that womens ripening independence had accelerated a revolution in manners and moral philosophy in American society (95). The 1920s did bring significant changes to the lives of American women. introduction War I, industrialization, suffrage, urbanization, and birth control increased womens economic, political, and cozy 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. Further more, Hollywood and the emerging science of advertise increasingly tied conceptions of femininity to a specific standard of physiological beauty attainable by few. By 1930, American women (especially affluent whites) had won newfound power and independence, but still lived in a prejudiced culture where their gender limited their opportunities and defined their place in society. World War I and industrialization both brought greater economic indecorum to American women. With immigration curtailed and hundreds of thousands of men needed for the armed forces, womens beat back 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 shortly 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 ... ...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 deca de 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 grammatical gender 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 distinct Wells. America and the Great War, 1914-1920. Wheeling, Ill. Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1998.H427 website http//bss.sfsu.edu/tygiel/Hist427