As decades go, the 1920s look pretty darned good. “Our Wages Highest in World’s History, Hoover Declares,” headlined the New York Times on December 2, 1927. A subhead reported that Herbert Hoover, the secretary of commerce, was expecting the country to enjoy perpetual prosperity. That part, um, turned out to be wrong.
While the big boom in incomes was enjoyed mostly by the people who were already pretty wealthy, it was hard for average citizens not to feel that things were skyrocketing for them, too. When the decade started, about a third of American families had cars—10 years later, it was more than three-quarters. The impossible models of the early years, with the dreaded start-up cranks, had been replaced by versions that were easy for women to use, and women drivers were everywhere. You could buy a car or a house or a new home appliance with credit, and omnipresent advertisers were urging people to do just that. Americans were moving to the cities in droves—for the first time more than half the population lived in urban areas. The world of homemaking was transformed by the arrival of refrigerators, toasters, electric vacuum cleaners, and, gradually, washing machines. Along with a growing expectation that housework not be so much work. “If we get married, I’ll keep house better than mother does hers,” a girl promised her boyfriend in an ad for S.O.S, the new steel wool soap pads. “But I’m not going to turn into a slave. You men! You think drudgery is a sign of good housekeeping.”
It was, in many ways, a terrific time for women. They were going to college more frequently, getting better jobs, and losing some of their terror about the possibility of staying single. In London, the Daily Telegraph published a grim report on “Marriage in America” that theorized that since women in the United States could get good jobs, they did not want “a great, hulking, cranky man to wait on all the time.” The paper claimed that 30 percent of New York’s unmarried women fell into that category, while another 20 percent “will not marry an average man because they think there is a chance of trapping an American millionaire.”
It was great to be a woman, but it wasn’t so great to be older. The New Woman, who could be any age, gave way to the flapper, who most definitely could not. The flapper was the era’s icon—daring and flashy and, to be honest, a bit of a brat. She was thin, with a boyish figure—the only foundation garment that was popular with the young was a bra that could flatten, rather than enhance, the bust. Curves were so out of style that a child who noticed a picture of Lillian Russell was heard asking her mother who the “fat lady” was. The flapper wore light, short skirts that showed off her legs, only partially covered with flesh-colored hose that she rolled down to the knee. A lawmaker in Ohio, in keeping with the grand and glorious tradition of state legislatures, introduced a bill to ban skirts that did not “reach to that part of the foot known as the instep.” Someone in Utah proposed “fine and imprisonment” for anyone whose skirt rose “higher than three inches above the ankle,” while a Virginia legislator, turning his attention upward, wanted to outlaw anything that displayed more than “three inches of her throat.”
The flapper stayed out late, danced with abandon, smoked and drank, and made it clear she had little regard for the rules about sex and decorum that her parents had obeyed. “Repressions have been released… exhibitionism has changed from a vice into a virtue,” complained V. F. Calverton, a leftist writer who was appalled by “this new girl, with all her emptiness of ideas and effusiveness of emotions.” While a great many women didn’t get any closer to the flapper model than a new hairstyle, the whole nation got the idea: the younger generation intended to live life full force and, of course, never get old.
“My candle burns at both ends,” wrote Edna St. Vincent Millay, who was 28 when she published what was probably the poem of the decade.
It will not last the night.
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.
The new prototype was Zelda Fitzgerald, who arrived in New York in 1920 at the age of 19 with the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and married him three days later. The flapper, Zelda once wrote, “awoke from her lethargy… bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into the battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure, she covered her face with powder and paint because she didn’t need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring. She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do.” It was a life plan that clearly wasn’t going to last much past 25.
Zelda was, Scott Fitzgerald said, “the heroine of my stories,” and the couple tore through America and Europe dancing on tables, getting into fights, and drinking nonstop, both conscious they were a bestselling brand. It all ended badly, with alcoholism, mental illness, and divorce. But while she lasted, Zelda was the perfect example of the fact that young, attractive women were no longer excluded from public platforms. While she was a talented writer, Zelda had a national profile in the ’20s simply for being beautiful and outrageous and the muse of a famous novelist. Other women, far less dependent on a male partner, were also finding that if you wanted the world to pay attention to your message, there was nothing better than being young and comely. The time when women found it easier to get the nation’s attention if they were unthreateningly matronly had vanished.
The theater, which had long celebrated actresses with large voices, large gestures, and large figures, was no longer the most popular form of mass entertainment. Movies had taken hold—American producers were cranking out an average of 800 feature films a year for an eager national audience. In the all-American city of Muncie, Indiana, a survey found movie attendance was higher than church attendance. Casting directors wanted their heroines to have delicate figures and no facial lines that would be magnified on the big screen. When the plots didn’t involve historic romance—sword fights and kissing—they celebrated saucy flappers or spunky little girls. The first great movie star, Mary Pickford, was cast as a child into her 30s. (A hardheaded businesswoman, Pickford co-founded United Artists at about the time she was playing Pollyanna and Little Annie Rooney before the cameras.) The rather creepy obsession with childlike women went beyond the films—when the first Miss America Pageant was held in 1921, the winner, Margaret Gorman, was a tiny 16-year-old who passed the time between events on a nearby playground, shooting marbles.
One exception to the trend was the popular world of blues singers. Two of the biggest names were Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and Mamie Smith, who achieved their peak popularity when they were long past their 20s. “To say that Ma holds her own with those of lesser years would be putting it in a small way,” wrote an African American critic in 1928, when Rainey was 42. But Hollywood movies suggested there wasn’t a whole lot of hope for anyone who wasn’t flapper-sized. A female fan, taking the most positive attitude conceivable, wrote a letter to a movie magazine praising films’ obsession with youth. It was, she argued, “keeping the modern woman slim and healthy and keen, as young at forty as her mother was at thirty and her grandmother at twenty.” It was a deeply American sentiment—if the public suddenly became obsessed with youth, it was your job to start looking more youthful. “More power to the Gloria Swansons, the Elsie Fergusons, the Irene Castles and the Viola Danas!” concluded the fan, naming some stars who were still flying high in their late 20s and 30s. Alas, the women on her list would all be retired or pretty much washed up by the end of the decade. Gloria Swanson survived best, and we remember her now mainly for her 1950 role as the aged, demented former star trying to rekindle her long-dead career in Sunset Boulevard.
To get another slant on the way the world was turning, consider an ad from Gossard Corsets, which appeared in Ladies’ Home Journal in 1922. The pitch began by mentioning the importance of foundation garments for “the young girl who isn’t built like a willow wand” but then shifted quickly to the main target: “that other woman who hasn’t been nineteen for dear knows how many years.” The “other woman” couldn’t expect a teenage figure to arrive on its own. “You’ve got to make up in cleverness what you’ve lost in youth. Your corsets are all that stands between you and that vague, shapeless bourne from whence no traveler returns—age.”
Corset makers had always seemed to specialize in ads aimed at making older women feel suicidal, and this was hardly the first time in American history that an advertiser assured readers its product would make them look younger. But the interesting thing about the Gossard pitch is the target age. Middle-aged women were no longer being given tips on how to look as if they were closer to 30. Now the presumption was that 19 was everyone’s ideal. A skin cream company ad in 1923 featured a girl announcing, “Mother, you’re looking younger every day!”—which was pretty obvious since the mother and daughter had the same face in the picture.
Scanning through the media of the 1920s, you might be excused for assuming women consisted of three types: 19-year-olds, women trying to look as if they were still 19, and those for whom the ship of youth had sailed entirely. After a stretch of progress in which older women found social acceptance, the tide had shifted. The new consumer economy and its young target audience were the stars of the show. Their mothers might not have been consigned to a rocking chair with a hideous cap and shawl, but they might as well have been, given the dwindling attention the world paid to them. Sometimes in the 1920s their fate sounded even more horrible than that rocker. In an essay entitled “Human Junk,” the editor of Ladies’ Home Journal referred to the aged as a burden made up of people who “have been broken on the wheel.”
The medical profession was on the same page about aging, but some researchers were coming up with what they regarded as… cures. “The alleged joys of old age have been imagined to console us in our downfall, which is considered inevitable and irremediable,” wrote Dr. Serge Voronoff, a French surgeon. Voronoff made an international splash in the 1920s when he claimed he had “transformed” an elderly woman with the graft of an ovary from a female chimpanzee. “Her figure had again become erect, her movements alert; her face no longer wore the expression of pain that made it look so old.” Best of all, the physician claimed, his patient “was again able to climb lightly her six flights of steps” and work 12 hours a day. He insisted his operation should be performed immediately “on a large scale” in all old-age homes. Voronoff was also enthusiastic about grafting slices of monkey testicles onto men’s scrota, and eventually the medical world did figure out that he was off his rocker. But he was hardly the only physician expressing faith in science’s power to eliminate aging. “Immortal life will be achieved by the aid of applied science; it is what the whole scheme of evolution moves forward to,” predicted Dr. Charles A. Stephens, a popular writer. Good thing, since Stephens also wrote that getting old meant entering a period of “grossness, coarseness and ugliness.”
“I’m hipped on Freud and all that,” says one of the trendy young women in Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, referring to the idea that everything is about sex. Freud and sex were extremely popular topics in the 1920s, and anyone who was keeping up with the conversation knew that things didn’t look good for postmenopausal women. “It is a well-known fact… that after women have lost their genital function their character often undergoes a peculiar alteration,” Sigmund himself wrote. “They become quarrelsome, vexatious and overbearing, petty and stingy; that is to say, they exhibit typically sadistic and anal-erotic traits which they did not possess earlier, during their period of womanliness.”
Freud was hardly alone. The psychological community in general tended to regard both spinsters and menopausal women as either (a) pathetically stripped of all sexuality or (b) overcome by sexual drives that could lead them to do anything, including seduce innocent boys. “It’s been in the background of my mind every minute like a terrible obsession. I wonder I haven’t gone mad,” says a middle-aged teacher in Black Oxen, a bestselling novel. “Some of us old maids do go mad.” One of her colleagues, the desperate woman continued, had lost her mind a few years earlier, and the doctors reported her ravings were “the most libidinous he had ever listened to.” The theory that menopausal women were oversexed wasn’t new. But the more freewheeling public conversation of the ’20s made the discussion both more open and more inventive.
Black Oxen told the transformation story of a 58-year-old Austrian countess whose friends felt age had made her “withered, changed, skinny… God! Mary Ogden!” Mary returns in triumph with a new name and a stunning new look achieved through a miraculous breakthrough in glandular therapy. Not only is she a beauty who appears to be in her 20s; she is back to being interesting. “People growing old are condemned for prejudice, smugness, hostility to progress… but this attitude is due to aging glands alone,” she explains to her eager friends.
It was, of course, fiction. But at the time, scientists really were experimenting with perpetual-youth therapies, transplanting ovaries from young women into their older patients. “The senile female becomes more vigorous, shows renewed sexual desire, exerts a renewed attraction of the male, and after a longer period of sterility is once more capable of becoming pregnant and producing offspring,” claimed the Australian sexologist Norman Haire, who lectured in the United States. It was the newest version of the chimpanzee story, and it would be far from the last.
In the real world, medicine was making some progress in improving the quality of life for older people, without the aid of chimpanzees’ private parts. Conditions like fistulas and a prolapsed uterus could be cured by surgery. Americans’ diet, on the whole, was better. And there was a new option coming ’round the bend: plastic surgery. In 1922, Ladies’ Home Journal sent writer Ethel Lloyd Patterson on a tour of cosmetic surgeons, to report back on whether a face-lift was a good option for the nearly 40 crowd. Patterson’s conclusion was—not yet. But she was optimistic about the future. The way science was progressing, she predicted, “it soon will not be necessary for women to grow old at all—I mean shriveled or waddling old and all that.”
The movies were full of makeovers for the middle-aged—dowdy matrons who miraculously reclaimed their youth by cutting their hair and putting on different clothes. New diet products flooded the market, some of them deeply suspect. Marmola, advertised as dried animal thyroid glands, promised women they could lose weight without “table restraint.” Wearing a harness called the I-On-A-Co was supposed to send a mysterious force through the body that would cut fat.
Older women were following the younger generation’s fashion lead: cropped hair and skirts that were dramatically shorter than in the previous era. The Journal of Commerce determined that the amount of fabric required to make a complete outfit had dropped, in 15 years, from 19 yards to 7. By 1927, there were 7,000 different cosmetic products for sale in the country, most of them lotions, creams, tinted foundations, and rouge. At the end of the decade, when Congress imposed tariffs on imported consumer goods, Congresswoman Mary Teresa Norton of New Jersey protested that while “lipsticks, perfumes and the like once were luxuries… Today they are necessities.” Helena Rubinstein built a cosmetics empire that she presciently sold in 1928, netting $7.3 million—about $106 million today—just before the stock market crash. After the Depression hit and the value of the company plummeted, Rubinstein bought it back again, launching her own outreach campaign to convince investors—especially women investors—that they should sell her back their shares. She managed all this from her bed, where she was recovering from a hysterectomy.
The culture of the ’20s allowed advertisers to be increasingly vocal about the evil effects of gray hair. (“She retires, a reigning beauty whose triumphs were the envy and despair of a hundred rivals. She awakes to tragedy! In the night relentless age had laid a silvering finger on her hair. Youth betrayed by Time!”) But hair dyeing was still controversial: ads often referred to their product as a remedy for “prematurely graying hair,” which suggested that customers just needed to rectify an error rather than purposely conceal the effects of aging. The real barrier was not so much mortality as practicality. Despite all the technological progress the nation was making, hair coloring hadn’t really improved to the point where the hair in question didn’t wind up looking rather peculiar after an application.
The generation gap was most painful in the ranks of the middle-class women who had run the clubs, spurred the reform movements, fought for the right to vote, and written all those essays on how the key to combatting age was getting involved in things outside yourself. Now all that was out of style. “Causes sweep by them unheeded,” wrote Margaret Culkin Banning, a 36-year-old novelist and women’s rights advocate, in an essay denouncing her contemporaries as “The Lazy Thirties.” The housewives who 10 or 15 years earlier had sent their children off to school and then marched into the world of charitable endeavors and reform politics were now just—sitting at home. “They are younger than women of that age have ever been before, more confident of retaining their beauty, less burdened by housewifery, and better educated,” Banning said. But she added, “Their point in common is inertia, their utter lack of response to the battle cries that used to get women into action.” The mantle of reform leadership, she concluded, “may flap emptily in the wind until it blows to rags.”
The people being criticized tended to agree. Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, a New York essayist, wrote a famous article for Harper’s in 1927 in which she dismissed feminism as irrelevant and irritating. The modern young woman, Bromley said, hated the very word because it suggested “either the old school of fighting feminists who wore flat heels and had very little feminine charm, or the current species who antagonize men with their constant clamor about maiden names, equal rights, woman’s place in the world, and many another cause… ad infinitum.” While her generation certainly appreciated everything the old reformers had accomplished, Bromley said breezily, the modern woman had no intention of picking up their leadership mantle—“indeed, she thinks they should have been buried in it.”
If those older activist women of the Progressive Era had lost their sway, one of the reasons was because they had gotten what they wished for. In 1919 and 1920, voters approved amendments to the Constitution giving women the right to vote and prohibiting the manufacture or sale of liquor. The two signal goals of the reform movement had been achieved. But neither victory delivered quite what their backers had hoped.
People quickly became used to the idea that women were voting, and there was little or no talk of ever going back. The Nineteenth Amendment was a complete success on that count. But it was a flop in terms of effect. The women’s vote—which was supposed to deliver clean politics, better education, health care for the poor, and a long list of other social goals—never really materialized. Women didn’t turn out as often as men, and when they did, they voted pretty much the same as their husbands, brothers, and fathers. The best example of the failure of suffrage to live up to expectations was the sad case of the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act. It wasn’t a large program—just a modest effort to provide clinics in poor, mainly rural areas and to educate poor women about infant care. But it was exactly the kind of legislation female reformers had talked about. Congress passed it in 1921 with the expectation that the politicians who had voted for it would be rewarded by their new constituents. When one of the opponents argued that the bill would promulgate maternity clinics run by “ladies who have not had babies,” a supporter noted pointedly that “old maids are voting now.”
Then in 1929, the act was repealed. Partly it was due to lobbying by the American Medical Association, which felt Congress was encroaching on doctors’ turf. Partly it was due to the increasingly conservative temper of the times—the public, with its eye on all that perpetual prosperity, worried about Bolsheviks and immigrants and militant labor unions. But none of that would have mattered if politicians hadn’t discovered they didn’t really need to worry very much about the women’s vote.
The second great victory of the early-twentieth-century women’s movement was Prohibition, which reformers won with disastrous consequences. The idea of banning the sale of liquor was popular for a while—that was obvious, since the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution managed to get passed. But the moment faded. By the end of the decade, bootleg liquor was one of the biggest businesses in the country, and more than a third of all federal convictions were for violation of liquor laws. The link between the women’s reform movements and Prohibition helped solidify the younger generation’s conviction that older feminists were a bunch of irritating prudes.
Alcohol had always divided women from men in urban America. Middle-class husbands went off to their clubs to smoke and drink in a female-free atmosphere. In polite society, men retired together after dinner to share some port while their teetotaler wives went into another room to sip tea. Working-class husbands went off to the local saloon while their families worried whether Dad would blow his salary on whiskey. The impetus for Prohibition was the very real problem saloon life posed for poor women and children, but middle-class women’s hostility to alcohol also had a lot to do with that dividing line. Most of them had no experience with drinking, and they could not comprehend that wine or beer or whiskey could be anything but a terrible social evil.
As it turned out, Prohibition made everything worse. Older women still stayed home with their tea, but men of all ages flocked to speakeasies, and the younger women went with them. Nightclubs were very much a part of the ’20s culture—in fact, for icons like Zelda Fitzgerald, drinking seemed to be the entire point. There were, of course, millions of families in which everybody—male and female, young and old—abstained. But even they were reading the papers and going to movies, where the heroes spent a disproportionate amount of time wearing tuxedoes and flirting with flappers over martinis. The only people who had no part in this new scenario were older women. When they showed up in movie plots at all, they were generally sweet but passive mother figures. Or worse. In Ankles Preferred, a comedy about a struggling dressmaking business, the owners’ non-youthful and unappealing spouses are introduced with close-ups of their fleshy ankles, complete with drooping stockings.
Older women’s reactions to their new and extremely unattractive image ranged from unease to panic—much of it ginned up by the media—over the possibility of losing one’s husband to a flapper hussy. Nearly 300 movies in the 1920s featured themes of infidelity, and the betrayal often involved an older husband and a younger woman. In Dancing Mothers, when flapper Clara Bow’s respectable boyfriend gets angry with her for flirting with another man in a nightclub and threatens to tell her father, Bow shrugs and says, “Go ahead, he’s right over there.” And Dad was indeed right over there in a corner, romancing a young woman who was most definitely not Mom.
“Which wins, mature companionship or that baby stare?” writer Helen Bullitt Lowry asked in a Harper’s Bazar essay called “The Evolution of a New Social Technique: Or How to Keep a Husband.” (It appeared in May 1922—the bridal issue.) Lowry was something of a flapper expert, having written about them extensively for every publication from the New York Times to Southern Cultures. “For the first time in the history of our modern civilization,” she warned, “‘married men’ are no longer taboo to the young philanderers.… As a consequence the older woman must go out into the social market-place and compete all over again for her own private husband.”
The media speculated that while the flappers were out dancing with their beaus, male “lounge lizards” were partying with older women, or “flapper dames.” It’s not clear how many flapper dames there really were, but the idea that an older woman could get her revenge for all the disadvantages the era piled on her was another popular movie plot. In Dancing Mothers, Clara Bow’s mother, played by 36-year-old Alice Joyce, tries to save her spoiled daughter Kittens from an affair, and winds up running off to Europe with Kittens’s boyfriend herself, leaving her unfaithful husband and selfish child behind.
If the flappers were winning the war for the nation’s attention, it was in part because they were such great consumers—eager purchasers of cosmetics, clothing, fashion magazines, hair products, cigarettes, and costume jewelry. They were the top targets of an advertising industry that was exploding—in 1920 people were exposed to six times the commercial ads they saw in 1900, and the numbers kept rising. “Today’s woman gets what she wants,” said an ad in the Chicago Tribune, notable for its attempt to cover all possible bases. “The vote. Slim sheaths of silk to replace voluminous petticoats. Glassware in sapphire blue or glowing amber. The right to a career. Soap to match her bathroom’s color scheme.”
Older women were well aware that they’d been pushed out of the public eye by daughters and nieces and granddaughters who didn’t share the values they’d expected to hand down. To make things worse, not only were younger women bored by politics and good works; they also seemed to behave… really badly. Lillian Symes, another one of those alienated 30-somethings, noted that she and her friends had thrown jazz parties and believed in the right to smoke and drink. But, she added, they “considered overindulgence… ‘rather sloppy’” and were “thoroughly revolted by the promiscuous pawing and petting permitted by so many technically virtuous young women to-day.”
It was all a terrible disappointment for Jane Addams. Never a fan of Prohibition, she was nonetheless dismayed by the nation’s sudden obsession with drinking and sex. Addams was hardly alone. Vida Scudder, a prominent reformer and essayist who was teaching young women at Wellesley College, described the 1920s as the worst part of her career. Complaints about female college students had been building up for some time. In 1906, Wellesley professor Margaret Sherwood begged young women who were going to college for fun to consider another path: “If she longs for dramatic activity, is there not a stage? If she yearns for the trapeze, is there not a circus? Will she not leave our beloved college what it was intended to be, a place for training the mind?” Trying to bridge the gap, 69-year-old Addams gave a speech in 1929 in which she assured young women that her generation had no desire to boss them around “for we are ambitious to be remembered as comrades and not as mentors.” She did the best she could, but by the 1920s, Addams had lost some of her influence. If there was a most-popular woman, it was probably someone like Clara Bow, who starred in dozens of hugely profitable movies built around the idea that girls just want to have fun.
Women continued to be the nation’s most avid readers, but a lot of what they read was truly terrible. The Sheik, by Edith Hull, a sensational hit, was your basic falling-in-love-with-your-rapist trash. (“Why have I brought you here? You ask me why? Bon Dieu! Are you not woman enough to know?”) During some years in the ’20s, half the bestsellers belonged to female authors. That meant both a great deal and not very much at all, since we’re sloshing between novels by the likes of Edith Wharton and Ellen Glasgow, on the one hand, and those celebrating rapist sheiks, on the other. Not surprisingly, female heroines in the classics tended to be more complicated, older, and less likely to wind up with a happy ending. In Wharton’s The Age of Innocence the hero is stuck with his pretty young fiancée when he falls in love with her 30-year-old cousin, Ellen. Ellen loses the man. But at the end the reader knows—and this was a rather common theme in novels with older heroines—that she is a noble character and the youthful fiancée is a weak little thing who will never, ever make him happy. Glasgow’s Barren Ground follows Dorinda from a poor farm girl of 20 to a successful businesswoman of 50. In between she’s betrayed by her fiancé, suffers a miscarriage, and marries a man she doesn’t love. But she outlives and outachieves all the major male characters and takes pleasure in her thriving dairy business: “Repose, dignity, independence, these were the attributes with which she faced middle age, for the lines in her face were marks of character, not emotion.… Though she clung to youth, it was the youth of the spirit.”
Work was a new frontier for women in the ’20s. One reason advertisers were so obsessed with flappers was that a lot of them were wage earners. People living in the decade—or at least the ones writing in the popular press—seemed convinced that the sky was the limit when it came to jobs. “Within the space of a single day, one can ride in a taxi driven by a woman, directed by traffic signals designed by a woman, to the office of a woman engineer, there to look out of the window and observe a woman steeplejack at her trade or contemplate the task of the woman blacksmith whose forge was passed on the way,” announced one writer in 1929, going a little over the top. The chances of encountering a woman steeplejack were really pretty remote. And while the number of women professionals was soaring, most of them were in the traditional occupations, like teacher, librarian, social worker, and nurse. Nevertheless, the very fact that opinion makers thought female engineers and taxi drivers were a good idea was quite a leap.
While most women still expected to get married, they were less likely to view it as the single achievement that would determine their future happiness. For older women, that was a big step forward. They might have been urged to look as if they’d just graduated from high school, but popular culture was moving away from the familiar obsession about finding a husband or falling into the waste bin. “What has become of the useful maiden aunt?” asked an ad in a women’s magazine, which showed a picture, dated “1900,” of a woman who seemed to be teetering on the verge of middle age, dressed in black, and presumably waiting to be asked to do someone’s chores. “She isn’t darning anybody’s stockings, not even her own,” the ad continued triumphantly. “She is a draftsman or an author, a photographer or a real estate agent.… She is the new phenomenon in everyday life.”
Once again, it’s important to point out that the actual number of female drafters was pretty low. During World War I, women did take over some traditionally male jobs, but when the soldiers returned to reclaim their old places, that was generally the end of the story. Teachers continued to be underpaid—so much so that some rural areas were still recruiting their faculty from high schools. But there was no question that a woman who decided not to get married had options. The 80-year-old novelist Rhoda Broughton compared her youth in the middle of the nineteenth century to the dashing girls of 1920 and noted approvingly that the new generation would not have to endure the “intense dreariness of the afternoon of life” the way “single women of small means” had existed in earlier times.
The attitude toward the unmarried is one of the critical markers that determine how well women of any age will fare in society. If girls can’t envision a full, happy life without a husband, then we’re back in the early nineteenth century, with 18-year-olds betting their entire future on their ability to land an acceptable mate, fast. Another marker is whether women who do get married can also have careers. Only about 10 percent of married women worked in the 1920s, and the idea of working mothers was still extremely controversial. Sometimes it was celebrated. A bestselling novel, The Home-Maker, introduced the perfectly miserable Knapp family, which is transformed for the better when Lester, the father, falls off the roof and is paralyzed. Wife Evangeline, an obsessive house cleaner whose perfectionism was driving the kids mad, goes to work in the same department store where poetic Lester was a terrible failure. Lester loves being at home with the kids. Evangeline thrives and gets enormous raises. The children blossom under their father’s tender care. The crisis comes when Lester seems to recover the use of his legs, threatening everyone’s happiness. But Dorothy Canfield, the 46-year-old author, saved the day by introducing a sympathetic doctor who grasps the whole picture and announces that Lester should never try to walk again.
Canfield was not, however, the majority view, even in fiction. Another popular novel, This Freedom, featured Rosalie, a beautiful girl who becomes a successful banker while raising three children. Things seem to be going well, despite a certain amount of quiet carping from her husband. But when she hits middle age, her eldest son winds up in prison, her daughter dies at the hands of an abortionist, and her youngest son commits suicide. There’s a hint of a happy ending when Rosalie quits her job to help care for her orphaned granddaughter, but it’s fair to presume that the moral is not about the advantages of having a working mother.
That kind of dire attitude was common. Women’s magazines regularly featured stories about children who died while their mothers were at work. This Freedom was such a smash that the Literary Digest sent out queries to all the married women listed in Who’s Who in America, asking whether they thought a woman could “run a home and have a job, too.” Even though such super-achievers would seem likely to come down on the side of working mothers, the response was distinctly mixed. “She can if she has brains,” said one respondent, who then added unhelpfully: “Few women have brains.” Alla Nazimova, an actress, announced that she had “not given my husband half the happiness he deserves.” An editor theorized that two of her children, who died of cerebral meningitis, “might have been over-nervous because of my mental labors previous to their birth.”
A survey of white-collar men in 1924 showed nearly two-thirds felt married women shouldn’t work, and almost all the rest felt it was all right only as long as they hadn’t yet had children. “Generally speaking, we have learned to expect that the children of gainfully employed mothers will be neglected, ill-disciplined, poorly nourished, and educationally irregular,” wrote David Snedden, a leading educational theorist of the era. “Death-rates among the babies, truancy rates among the boys, and sexual immorality rates among the girls will be severely high.” If women were going to both work and be mothers, the popular consensus seemed to be that the job should be as trivial as possible. One female social scientist recommended a sideline like “typing, sewing, preparation of gift cards, painted lamp shades and the like.”
Older women who wanted or needed to get a real job ran into a wall of age discrimination, which was perfectly legal. “What is a woman 35 years of age to do?” asked a letter to the New York Sun in 1928. “I am a capable stenographer, well dressed (but not flashily), look thirty but have been turned down time and again because employers have drawn the dead line at twenty-five.” She wondered if all working women over 30 were supposed to “take chloroform.” A doctor, being interviewed about hair coloring, decried all the available preparations as “either unsuitable or dangerous.” But he added that he had come around a bit when an older patient simply told him: “It is impossible for a woman with gray hair to get a job.”
A 1929 study found that many factories, stores, and offices were indeed reluctant to hire older women—and “older,” in some cases, could cover almost everybody who had failed to keep that fabled 19-year-old complexion. The explanations ranged from pay scales to adaptability and the theory that younger people were “less moody and irritable.” The discrimination was greatest in offices, less severe in department stores and factories. But there was one type of employment agency that seemed to have no trouble placing older women, the report added. “That is the group specializing in the supplying of domestic help.”
Domestic help was the one area of the economy where black women predominated. They made up more than half the population of maids, cooks, and other types of household servants by 1930. The jobs tended to be low paying, physically demanding, and generally involved working for a housewife who had high standards about the way everything should operate. It was crazy to imagine that African American women labored as maids and cooks in other people’s homes out of preference. But a stereotype of the happy mammy endured. She was like Aunt Jemima, the icon on the pancake-mix box. Aunt Jemima seemed to be modeled after a minstrel show figure, but as the product grew more and more popular, publicists offered more and more details about The Legend. One promotion told the story of a Confederate general and his aide, trying to avoid Union soldiers and starvation in a lonely struggle through Mississippi, who came across an isolated house and a friendly voice calling, “Lawzee! You chilluns pestah th’ life out o’ yo’ po’ ol’ mammy with yo’ evahlastin’ appetite fo’ pancakes!” Aunt Jemima was thrilled to see the white Southern soldiers, and her pancakes revived the weary men. Then, the story continued, after the war the general brought her and her recipe to the eagerly awaiting North. The copywriters had to make it clear that Jemima wasn’t leaving the South because she was dissatisfied with her lot in life. So another ad recounted her departure from the old homestead: “How happy she had been on that old Louisiana plantation! How kind, how noble, had been her ‘massa,’ Colonel Higbee!”
In 1923, Nancy Green, who had spent many years portraying Aunt Jemima in promotion tours around the country, was struck by a car and killed. She was 89 and her life had encompassed much more than pancakes—Green had settled in Chicago and helped organize the large and prominent Olivet Baptist Church while speaking out against poverty and racism in her adopted city. But when she died, a number of papers mixed the actual facts of her life with the Jemima fiction. She was sometimes reported to be a former happy plantation cook. In the black press, columnist A. L. Jackson seemed to admire the canny way the ad men did their exploiting: “There is no good reason why some wide-awake young business man from our own crowd should not seize upon that skill and capitalize it for himself and for the Race as these white men did with Aunt Jemima.”
Once women had the right to vote, it seemed obvious that the next step should be elective office. That was one job that didn’t come with age limits. The handful of women who made it into Congress in the 1920s were all middle-aged or older. The first female senator, Rebecca Latimer Felton, was the 87-year-old widow of a prominent Georgia politician, and a Progressive movement activist in her own right. (Like many Southern women’s rights advocates, Felton had racial attitudes that were not only unprogressive but downright chilling.) When Georgia’s incumbent senator died in 1922, Gov. Thomas Hardwick needed a placeholder who would warm the seat—very briefly—until a special election could be held. He named Felton on October 3. She was sworn in when Congress reconvened on November 21. The next morning, she made a speech looking forward to the day when many women would serve in the chamber. Then her male successor was sworn in and she was gone.
Felton’s stay was shorter than normal, but the fact that she was the widow of a former congressman was very typical. Ten women served in the House in the 1920s, and four were congressional widows. Another, Winnifred Huck, won an election to serve out the term of her deceased father. “I have come into the political world like a clap of thunder out of a clear sky,” she announced rather grandly. During her brief tenure she took a strong anti-war stance that was broken briefly when she nominated her son to the U.S. Naval Academy—a move that forced the academy to waive its normal height requirement for Huck’s diminutive offspring. Another early congresswoman, Katherine Langley, was elected to the seat that belonged to her husband, John “Pork Barrel” Langley, who was convicted of violating the Prohibition Act by trying to sell 1,400 bottles of whiskey. Ruth Hanna McCormick of Illinois was the daughter of Ohio senator Mark Hanna and the widow of a U.S. senator. Florida’s Ruth Bryan Owen, the daughter of three-time Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan, was also elected in 1928 and joked that she was “the first Bryan who ever ran for anything and got it.”
Everyone realized it was a less than stellar beginning.
The first generation of congresswomen tended toward short stays—most lasted just one or two terms. But there were exceptions. Edith Nourse Rogers took over her husband’s seat when he died in 1925, but she was reelected on her own, again and again. When she died in office in 1960, Rogers had served an extraordinarily productive thirty-five years. “The first thirty years are the hardest,” she said. Mary Teresa Norton, who was elected from New Jersey in 1924, remained in office until 1951. She was a protégé of Frank Hague, a boss of county politics who promoted her career in an attempt to co-opt the new women’s vote before it became clear there wasn’t going to be one. Norton was 49 when she was first elected to Congress. “I was starting a… career more strenuous, exciting, and rewarding than I had ever dreamed of having—at an age when women of my mother’s generation wrapped themselves in shawls and sat down by the fireside to await the end,” she said later. Like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the other pioneers of a much earlier era, Norton used her age to skate around the barrier against women and public life. When a man in the audience at one of her speeches shouted that women should be at home “looking after their children,” Norton, who had lost her only child, replied, “How very, very fortunate they are to have children! That privilege has been denied me. If I had children, I’d certainly be at home with them now if they needed me. But since I haven’t, I’m here talking to you about a new responsibility that has been given to women.”
Norton became the first woman to run a House committee, when the Democrats took over in 1931 and she became chair of the Committee on the District of Columbia. “This is the first time in my life I have been controlled by a woman,” one member complained. “It’s the first time I’ve had the privilege of presiding over a body of men, and I rather like the prospect,” Norton returned. She began the fight to give the District of Columbia self-government, a battle that continues to this day.
One less inspiring arena for women was the ever-expanding beauty-aid industry. Actresses had been extolling the glories of soaps and face creams for several generations, but the idea of using non-entertainers’ endorsements was new. (Although, you’ll remember, Henry Ward Beecher followed up his sex trial with a paid tribute to Pears’ Soap.) After the suffrage battle was won, Alva Belmont appeared in an unusual ad for Pond’s cold cream in return for a $1,000 donation to the National Woman’s Party. The ad praised her work for women and added that Belmont—who would have been over 70 at the time—“also is particularly interested in woman’s special problem of how to keep her force and her charm throughout her whole life.” While Belmont was a rebel, it turned out she was not prepared to go as far as to allow her picture to be used in an advertisement, so the soap maker substituted one of her library. It’s not every day you see a beauty product promoting itself with a picture of a room. Belmont’s actual testimonial was pretty direct, even stern: “A woman who neglects her personal appearance loses half her influence. The wise care of one’s body constructs the frame encircling our mentality, the ability of which insures the success of one’s life. I advise a daily use of Pond’s Two Creams.”
Among the prominent women putting in plugs for commercial products was Eleanor Roosevelt, whose husband, Franklin, a former vice-presidential candidate, was preparing to run for governor of New York. In 1927, she announced in Ladies’ Home Journal that she had a Simmons Beautyrest mattress in her home and found it “the most marvelous mattress in the world.”
We’ll be hearing more from her.