‘The “Flapper” Has Her Turn,’ reads a New York Times headline from February 8, 1917, heralding a spring fashion breakthrough that would turn the city on its head. The announcement comes from the business section, a textile industry report nestled among others; in the same newspaper section, equal column inches are given, respectively, to a dispatch on inflated wool prices and another on the profit perils of poorly cast showroom models. But there’s a knowing giddiness setting this trend-alert piece apart. Finally, the report goes, ‘girls of the intermediate or “flapper” size’ – grown women with skinny, boyish frames – would have ‘every reason to congratulate themselves this season on the kind of things the local manufacturers are turning out for them to wear.’ After years of neglect, a new cohort of stylish young women, of a certain age and build, would be able to purchase clothing made with their narrower figures in mind, straight from their favourite shops. Something else was happening, too: while the fabrics used for these women’s new, ready-to-wear dresses would be ‘practically a counterpart of the materials their older sisters are wearing,’ they would be offered in ‘the straight line silhouette’ that was starting to grace the shops of Paris, courtesy of a young designer named Coco Chanel. The future had arrived in Manhattan’s garment district, and the New York Times was on it.
There is a tendency to romanticize the 1920s as an age of sexual liberation that sprung fully formed, like Zeus, from the ashes of the Great War. The flapper – fortified by jazz, whisky pulled from garter flasks, economic prosperity, and a postwar sense of YOLO – bobbed her hair and rouged her cheeks, slept around and voted. She dangled cigarettes from car windows. Maybe she entertained onstage, luxuriating in the miasmatic brush of the smoke-soaked atmosphere on her naked limbs as nightclub audiences cheered.
Versions of this fairy tale have imposed themselves onto the cultural narrative to be told and repeated since the Jazz Age itself, maybe because they’re true in spirit if not precisely in the material records of women’s experiences. Air out the gin-soaked story of this period, and you’ll find that the flapper, as we collectively remember her, didn’t quite exist. The less intoxicating prologue to this story is that the flapper, or something like her, was a demographic figure whose likelihood was decades in the making.
In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, and leading up through World War I, the United States transformed from a nation of rural farmers into a manufacturing powerhouse whose cities swelled with the effluvium of erstwhile farmers looking for their own personal piece of the new economy. By 1890, the Western agricultural frontier was not just tapped out, but declared closed altogether. That year’s census described what had once been sold as pure rural opportunity as by then ‘so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.’ And so, the instincts that had previously driven opportunity-seeking homesteaders to try their luck out west were now pointing them into the opposite direction. According to historians Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, between 1870 and 1920, ‘for every industrial worker who became a farmer, twenty farm boys rushed to the city to compete for his job.’
For similar reasons, the same migratory patterns were shaping out in Europe and the UK, arguably to an even more dramatic effect. Census records from England and Wales in 1871 show a total rural population of 13.5 million, which decreased to 8.5 million by the 1920s. Even the Commonwealth was urbanizing: in Canada, the populations of both Toronto and Montreal surpassed the half-million mark by the end of World War I.
Many men were hopping trains from farm to city, but it was really women who led the wave of urban migration. A late-nineteenth-century study of rural Midwestern households bemoaned the farming country’s ‘defeminization,’ whereby an average six of ten daughters hit the road while an estimated seven in ten sons stuck around. A 1920 US Census Bureau survey would later confirm the trend’s ongoing persistence: ‘The farmer’s daughter is more likely to leave the farm and go to the city than is the farmer’s son.’
It’s easy to extrapolate the reasons why women would be more inclined than men to try their luck away from the homestead. Daily life on a family farm was exhausting and repetitive, a never-ending cycle of gruelling physical tasks: washing, cooking, sewing, mending, stoking the fire, minding the children. The back-breaking labours of home and hearth were compounded by the expectation that women spend the whole of their child-bearing years bearing, birthing, and rearing future farmhands. As the New England writer Hester M. Poole succinctly notes in an 1882 magazine article, ‘The farmer works from sun till sun; the farmer’s wife frequently till far into the night.’ The long, unpaid hours clocked by the average farm wife kept the family clothed, fed, and cared for, and gave her little in return other than, perhaps, the satisfaction of fulfilling what was expected of her. As her husband’s yield increased, so did her workload. ‘The average farmer’s wife is one of the most patient and overworked women of the time,’ marvelled an 1884 essay in the American Farmer. The same essay also noted that, of the 558 women admitted into the Connecticut Hospital for the Insane since its inception, 215 were housewives – ‘and of course for the most part the wives of farmers.’
Lacking skills beyond the so-called household arts, the farmer’s wife had limited economic recourse in the unfortunate event of death or abandonment; if her husband mistreated her or took to the bottle, as a good number unfortunately did, the best she might be able to hope for was succumbing to the tuberculosis or fatal childbirth that released so many other women of her day from their own, unending drudgery.
The rise of mass production, with the massive amount of minimally skilled labour it required, opened a door for women’s entry to the world of waged work. By the late 1880s it was often cheaper and faster to buy bread than to bake it, and canned foods had become an affordable, time-saving staple of most households. Ready-made clothing was also becoming standard, and priced within reach of all but the lowest-positioned on the economic ladder. Commercial laundry facilities expanded in prevalence by 50 to 100 per cent with each decade between 1870 and 1910, and the number of women they employed increased accordingly. With so much time saved on domestic duties, and factories clamouring for female labour, unmarried daughters were all but redundant in their parental homes. As a result, many of them simply left.
Three-quarters of these wage-earning women were single, partly because single women had greater incentive to work, but also because of the expectation that a married woman shouldn’t have to. The wide-eyed farm girl’s journey from field to factory – and swift descent from innocence – was a fascination of yellow journalists and literary realists alike, immortalized by characters like the protagonist of Theodore Dreiser’s 1900 novel Sister Carrie. Right from the book’s opening page, Dreiser’s omniscient (and very judgy) narrator reflects the era’s hand-wringing paternalism over young working women. ‘When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things,’ he wrote. ‘Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.’
The novel goes on to follow eighteen-year-old Carrie’s affairs with Chicago’s moneyed older men, who gift her with fine meals, theatre tickets, and sophisticated wardrobes as she sheds the remaining traces of her hayseed past, compromising her morals in exchange for material goods and opportunities. She swaps the toil of the factory floor for the superficial glamours of a kept woman, picking up a bit theatre role through her lover’s connections before making off with a different, married man. She eventually ends up a wildly successful stage actress in New York, earning $150 per week – over $4,000 in today’s US dollars. Meanwhile her nowestranged husband (the formerly rich, formerly married-to-someone-else lover) fades in a flophouse. Carrie’s a model of the American dream, and she’s miserable.
In broad strokes, Dreiser’s protagonist sent a cautionary message to a burgeoning middle class about the potential moral cost of ambition. But likely more immediately stirring, among contemporary readers, was Carrie’s reflection of the widely held fear that single young women entering the city on their own would find themselves overwhelmed by the oh-so-alluring frivolities of urban life, and relinquish their integrity to obtain them.
But fear of change doesn’t do much to curb it. As country folk continued to flock to cities, European immigrants arrived in droves. From 1880 to 1920, the number of foreign-born Americans doubled from nearly 7 million to just under 14 million. The bulk of these newcomers settled into the same Northeastern and Midwestern cities that were developing into hubs of manufacturing. By 1900, an estimated three-quarters of the populations of many large industrial cities – including New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Milwaukee, and Detroit – belonged to the immigrant community of either first- or second-generation Americans. A 1920 Census Bureau report confirmed that the US was no longer a nation of small farms: 51 per cent of Americans were now dwelling in cities, eking out an urban majority for the first time in American history.
The growing class of working women were employed by factories and offices, the department stores that clothed businessmen and the restaurants that fed them. Some toiled in laundries, others in wealthy families’ homes as nannies or maids. Some were sex workers, some cabaret performers. Following the turn of the twentieth century, the expanded clerical sector employed more than one in three new female workers between 1900 and 1915, and raised the average working woman’s full-time salary to just over half that of the average man. And whatever the job, single women made their own money and, in cities across the US, boarding houses multiplied to accommodate them affordably – and to offer previously unimaginable levels of privacy convenient for conducting intimate affairs.
The grim reality of the market economy was that the road to relative freedom for some women was paved with the exploitation of other women’s labour. Female wage earners could expect to be paid half as much as their male counterparts if they were lucky enough to have clerical work, and far less if employed on factory floors. The garment industry in particular was notorious for its meagrely paid female workforce – of which the majority were immigrant women – whose scanty salaries accompanied gruelling hours and taskmaster bosses.
The calamitous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which killed 146 New York City garment workers in 1911 and remains one of the deadliest industrial disasters in US history, drew into sharp relief the steep human cost of cheap consumer goods. Its workers, mostly Italian and Jewish immigrant women, could expect to earn between $7 and $12 for a fifty-two-hour workweek, less than $300 in today’s currency. Many perished from smoke inhalation or, horribly, by flinging themselves out the burning factory’s windows and onto the Greenwich Village street below, the workroom doors having been illegally locked shut by the factory proprietors to prevent the women from taking breaks. The disaster galvanized women’s unionization movements and a sharp re-evaluation of workers’ safety regulations. The woman’s workday shortened from the ten to seventeen hours typical in 1885 to under ten by 1914, opening a space in young women’s lives for the pursuit of leisure.
In tandem with a growing movement for worker rights, Congress authorized a 1911 report of the female labour force after three years of data collection. Helen L. Sumner, an economist who studied women’s suffrage and labour, authored the ninth volume of the Senate report History of Women in Industry in the United States, which shed necessary light on the wage inequality and long hours working women were forced to endure. Sumner also made some basic observations about the social implications of women at work that drew an explicit connection between women’s economic participation and the gendered changes in social convention that were raising the ire of conservative moralists:
It is evident that on the whole there has been a certain expansion of woman’s sphere – a decrease in the proportion employed in certain traditional occupations, such as ‘servants and waitresses,’ ‘seamstresses,’ and ‘textile workers,’ but an increase in the proportion employed in most other industries, many of them not originally considered as within woman’s domain … [T]his movement has affected, roughly speaking, all elements, according to nativity or conjugal education, of the population of working women.
Sumner alluded to the increasingly porous boundary between men’s and women’s work as one cause for what pearl-clutchers might describe as the working woman’s loss of innocence. At the very least, the woman’s domain was changing in ways beyond even what could be plainly observed walking through city streets. But, of course, in practice, working women’s adoption of new social mores was hardly so straightforward.
By and large, women of the labouring classes yearned to be seen – in spite of their possibly solitary dwellings and, perhaps, contact with single men – as decorous members of society, and certainly not as troublemakers. Beginning in the 1890s, thousands of women joined clubs in cities throughout the US that served as hubs of like-minded community, civic participation, and personal enrichment. Some were aimed at well-to-do women for the purpose of coordinating well-meaning, if often patronizing, social volunteer efforts among the mostly immigrant ranks of the urban poor. African American women established their own organizations, such as the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs in 1896, whose motto ‘Lifting as We Climb’ sought to teach ‘an ignorant and suspicious world that our aims and interests are identical with those of all good aspiring women.’ Many other clubs were dedicated spaces for (white) ‘working girls’ to make friends, take on civic enrichment projects, and carve out a place for themselves in a rapidly changing society.
An 1890 issue of Harper’s Bazaar reports that at a meeting of one such club, members discussed ways in which to improve their image. Solutions bandied about included gaining the respect of their employers by doing quality work (‘if the average quality of work goes up, public opinion in regard to it will rise in proportion’); working to ‘improve and cultivate our minds’; and careful conduct with the opposite sex (‘A girl or woman who permits familiarity from boys or men may cause much annoyance to other girls for each is responsible, not only for herself, but for others’). While so much about the working woman’s existence seemed to flout traditional conventions of femininity, it’s likely that the average low-wage factory worker would have preferred not to be held as a model for the feminist vanguard. She wanted what, ultimately, most women did: to marry, raise a family, and leave the wage-labour force behind without a backward glance.
At the same time, a new kind of self-assured and independent woman had begun to make her mark among the upper classes of urbanized European and American society. Unlike her working-class sisters, this privileged woman’s liberated existence wasn’t a by-product of new-found self-sufficiency from (relatively) low-wage labour but, rather, a rebellion against the social mores that had previously dictated upper-class women’s behaviour. The timing, however, was far from coincidental.
For generations, wealthy married women had been expected to do little other than raise children and maintain their households – or, more precisely, to manage the domestic staff that did the bulk of both. But by the late 1800s, most upper-class homes had a gas line to power light and heat, which meant no more hauling of wood and coal, and no more scrubbing of their sooty residues. Some homes even had their own water, washing away the cumulative hours spent visiting local pumps and hauling water back to the household, bucket by individual bucket. Laundry facilities eliminated the burden of daily wash, a physically gruelling and time-intensive activity. In turn, wealthy households didn’t need as many staff to keep their estates running smoothly. With little else to do, the matrons of these homes became painfully bored, even manifesting the symptoms we would now associate with depression.
The New Woman, as christened by the Irish feminist author Sarah Grand, emerged as a Gilded Age response to the misery produced by a culture that demanded polite uselessness of its well-to-do women. The New Woman, Grand proposed, embodied part of an awakening from her sex’s docile complicity in her own subjugation. She was boldly demanding better from men, but also more for herself.
The New Woman was, if not directly involved in the burgeoning suffrage movement, tacitly influenced by its momentum. She may have had a university education, in spite of the social consequences; in the 1870s and 1880s, the number of coeducational and women’s-only universities in the US swelled, though 75 per cent of those who graduated before 1900 would never marry. Or maybe she’d already been married and was now living on her own; thanks to the recent developments in matrimonial legislation that would allow her to retain her assets in the event of a divorce, a potential ex-husband wasn’t out of the question.
The outspoken, educated feminists of the upper class were an object of fascination in fin de siècle literature and, equally, fodder for public outcry. Men and women had previously occupied clearly delineated spheres: men in public, women in the home, with little cross-gender interaction outside of the family. As women rejected their designated domestic stations, they threatened what was, for many, a foundation of social order.
Though the ‘Woman Question’ jostled the collective consciousness, the intense aversion to women’s pursuit of public personhood hardly made a case for maintaining the status quo. The so-called ‘Bawling Brotherhood’ protested against the social infiltration of women, reflected in Basil Ransom’s protestations that ‘[t]he whole generation is womanized’ and ‘if we don’t look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity,’ in Henry James’s 1886 novel The Bostonians. No matter: women were tired of being held back, understimulated, and miserable. If men were unwilling to recognize women’s autonomy, that was on them.
The New Women of the Gilded Age, by and large, comprised a group of women whose class status afforded them both the opportunity and the entitlement to ruffle feathers. This feminist movement included few working-class women – not because poor women didn’t desire fair treatment, but rather the circumstances of urban poverty and gruesome working conditions posed more immediate concerns than the finer points of the Woman Question. Put another way, the New Woman could literally afford to run her mouth, trusting that there would still be food for her to put in it.
Still, despite the limitations in her perspective, the Gilded Age feminist’s position of socio-economic advantage would prove useful in setting a framework for what women might deign to strive for. The New Women were, after all, sufficiently distant from the basic quandaries of daily economic survival to allow for analysis – their own and everyone else’s – of what women’s changing roles might mean. They were uniquely positioned to even endeavour to suggest that male and female detractors of the women’s movement were, respectively, babies and cowards. The New Woman had the socio-political influence to address the socio-political implications of the collapse into one another of men’s and women’s spheres, and to suggest that society’s fixed notions of men, women, and the family could become unfixed. It was the New Woman who could confront the Woman Question: what was a woman, if not defined in relation to a man?
Moralists argued that it was for women’s own good to force their exclusion from public, enfranchised, wage-earning society. But as the free market proliferated, feminist writers like Charlotte Perkins Gilman flipped the script on moralistic hand-wringing in favour of the New Woman’s cause. Gilman argued in her 1898 treatise Women and Economics that, by positioning marriage and motherhood as the only acceptable occupations for women, a society that so scorned the ‘vice’ of prostitution was hypocritically selling marriage as a version of the same: ‘We are the only animal species in which the female depends on the male for food, the only animal species in which the sex-relation is also an economic relation.’
Just over a decade later, the anarchist Emma Goldman would pose a similar argument in her seminal 1910 essay, ‘The Traffic in Women.’ Here she is quoting the influential nineteenth-century British sexologist Havelock Ellis:
The wife who married for money, compared with the prostitute, is the true scab. She is paid less, gives much more in return in labor and care, and is absolutely bound to her master. The prostitute never signs away the right over her own person, she retains her freedom and personal rights, nor is she always compelled to submit to a man’s embrace.
As scholars of vice in the US have pointed out, the female sex workers who were the contemporaries of Gilman and Goldman had more money and personal freedom than any other women in America. ‘In fact,’ writes author Thaddeus Russell in his 2010 A Renegade History of the United States, ‘prostitutes won virtually all the freedoms that were denied to women but are now taken for granted … Prostitutes made, by far, the highest wages of all American women.’ Wax your moustaches on that, Progressive Era assholes.
The threat of sexual misconduct weighed heavily on the minds of polite society and civic leaders alike, and it nagged over a span of decades. Ambient unease over women’s sexual corruption pervaded the middle and upper classes in cities from London to New York. On both sides of the Atlantic, these concerns were amplified in large part by racism and xenophobia, as expressed in sensational tabloid reports and popular fictions of a purported scourge of ‘white slavery’ whereby men (of mostly Eastern European origin) lured young white women into forced prostitution. Though individual accounts of white slavery were reliably apocryphal, the looming legend provided a neat canvas upon which to project anxieties over women’s relatively new-found, and ever-increasing, public existence.
Following a 1910 investigation on white slave traffic, the financier John D. Rockefeller Jr. privately funded the establishment of a New York City Bureau of Social Hygiene in 1911. The superintendent of the New York State Reformatory for Women was among the bureau’s founding members, and the reformatory became the site of a research laboratory that would inform the bureau’s policy (though accounts vary on what, precisely, that laboratory set out to study, and to what end). For the next three decades, Rockefeller would pour nearly $6 million of his personal finances into measures intended to understand and prevent various social ills through public policy implementations, especially prostitution.
While ‘free love’ has been an oft-touted tenet of feminists since the days of Wollstonecraft, the notion that ‘respectable’ ladies might engage in premarital relations with the opposite sex was still, by the early days of the twentieth century, very much one that prompted desperate clutching at pearls. But the close comingling that urbanization encouraged, combined with the relative independence offered by living away from home, meant that more and more women were engaging in courtships that may have included sex before marriage. Many of these women would not have necessarily identified their forays into the world of sex as a single girl as stemming from a political agenda – most were simply motivated by the basic desire to live their lives without scrutiny and stigma. Moralizing sex panic didn’t slow the steady rise of the numbers of girls and women familiarizing themselves with boys and men over time. By the 1890s, a new term had entered the lexicon of working-class slang: date.
Dating marked a departure from the system of ‘calling’ that had preceded it, which had taken place largely in the home and was initiated by the woman and supervised by her family. A man could drop hints that an invitation to call would be much appreciated, but it was up to women to make the move. Meanwhile, dating turned women into objects of desire and men into the actors positioned to put the elements of a date into place, from the initial invitation to the logistics of paying. With dating, the woman’s family fell out of the courtship equation.
A date happened unchaperoned, out in the open, in the anonymity of the public sphere. Typically, this recreational activity would involve the purchase of a soda, a spin on a carnival ride, or perhaps seats at a cheap movie: a commercial transaction brokered out in the public marketplace. This departure in conduct had transformative repercussions; where older models of courtship were structured around a ritualized exchange of domestic niceties, dating was built on the public consumption of goods and services. Dating, in short, was good for the growing economy.
The advent of the date also imbued women’s sexuality with a new market value and, in turn, increased the average amount of effort and income a woman might spend on keeping up appearances. Middle-class social reformers like the writer Mary Augusta Laselle eyed such superficial airs with great suspicion. ‘The working girl’s hat, shoes, dress, and general attire are in too many cases a fantastic imitation of the costly costumes of women of large incomes,’ Laselle wrote in 1914, a condescension in line with the commonly held belief that working-class women were hoping to rise in social ranks by luring wealthier husbands. Whether or not that particular motivation for ‘putting on style’ was exactly fair or accurate, there were certainly dating-market advantages to keeping up appearances.
Dating also offered both men and women a new-found freedom to try out the affections of a partner – or several – without necessarily heading straight for the aisle. Facilitated by the free market, the advent of dating threw a new layer of capitalist competition into the quest for companionship. Women donned ready-to-wear fashions and powdered their noses with cosmetics they paid for, with money all their own, in service of standing out in the crowd of competing single dames. Inadvertently, they primed the culture for a character that would embody the reckless exuberance of new romance.
By the 1920s, the public’s perception of the type of young woman who went on ‘dates’ was nearly synonymous with the caricature of the flapper: a short-skirted libertine who flouted the conventions of all the women who’d come before her. This woman was an object of fixation and ridicule; she racked up boyfriends in her off-the-rack sheath dresses and lacquered hairdos, doing who knows what with them behind closed doors. But, not unlike the scaffolding she pieced together from department-store fashions, she was also largely a fictive ideal to be consumed.
Skidmore College professor emerita of English Linda Simon argues in Lost Girls: The Invention of the Flapper that the physical ideal of the flapper emerged in part from the massive popularity of Peter Pan, a boy permanently frozen in adolescence and always played onstage by a woman. Her short skirts and impossibly straight-lined sinews were etched into existence by the prolific illustrator John Held Jr.’s covers for the likes of Vanity Fair and Life magazines in the 1920s, and the dust jackets for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) and The Vegetable (1923). Cosmetic manufacturers leapt at the fetishization of youth and slenderness that the flapper so embodied – dieting came into fashion, and business boomed for girdle makers and cosmetic surgeons. The flapper, in other words, was a commodity: an idea to be bought and sold.
Many young women ascribed to this ideal. Despite early excitement in its business pages, the New York Times was slow to laud the modern woman of the 1920s – or, at least, knew to milk a good controversy when it saw one. In a 1921 letter to the editor that praised one of the paper’s recent stories, a young Edith M. Mendel (who would later become a pioneering advocate for mental health and disability rights under her married name, Edith M. Stern) countered her positive feedback with the assertion that ‘as a college senior, a flapper and a feminist, naturally I do not usually subscribe to your Victorian attitude toward women.’
A 1922 New York Times article, ‘More Ado about the Flapper,’ defined the newly liberated young woman largely in relation to her dating habits. This was a woman who led a mysterious double life, who would be ‘engaged more or less seriously upon other concerns’ during the day before flitting into the night with a revolving legion of dancing partners. The Times’s rhetoric in this piece also not-so-subtly aligns the practice of dating with the sale of sex: ‘The purpose of their flapping is collecting – collecting and still collecting – a male clientele – in short, beaux.’
One of the article’s subjects is the acclaimed stage and screen actress Laurette Taylor. Taylor, who by 1922 was approaching forty, dismissed the flapper as a ‘little rich girl.’ When countered with the suggestion that maybe single women on the dating market included independent gals with ordinary jobs, Taylor scoffed: ‘I don’t call those flappers. They are fast young persons. A good girl would be content with one man. She would collect him and begin her real job. Your flapper – if you can call her that – can’t work or study all day and dance all night and make good at what she works at.’
As is still true today, young women were the disproportionate targets of public scorn over a cultural shift that also, equally, pertained to men. The flapper wasn’t exactly out there dancing by herself. Further, there was no panic over the figure of the kind of man who went on ‘dates’; no one saw him as somehow an amoral aberration rather than an individual simply playing his part in a change in the tides. And despite the dismissive sneers of so many Laurette Taylors, the tides were definitely changing … with sexy results.
In his 1928 survey of one hundred married men and one hundred married women born before 1900, psychiatrist G. V. Hamilton found that 67 per cent of women born from 1886 to 1890 were virgins at marriage, as opposed to only 30 per cent of the same number of women born from 1891 to 1900. One hundred respondents may not constitute a scientific sample size, but it does hint at a trend with some momentum. Other studies supported the phenomenon, estimating that half of all college-educated women had engaged in premarital sex – and 21 per cent of women, regardless of education, by age twenty – by the 1920s.
Premarital sex also carried an economic connotation. Among working-class women whose wages were barely enough to survive on, sex offered a bartering tool to exchange for middle-class ‘treats,’ like movies and dinners, that their better-compensated male dates would be able to provide. At the Bureau of Social Hygiene’s ‘laboratory’ at the Bedford reformatory, many of the women inmates interviewed insisted they had been wrongfully accused of prostitution – they had never sold sex for money. Rather, as one woman reported, they went on dates with male friends who might offer trips ‘to Coney Island to dances and Picture Shows.’
In addition to the odd evening out, young women were also beginning to discover that sex was something they liked. ‘[S]moking, dancing like Voodoo devotees, dressing décolleté, “petting” and drinking, we do these things because we honestly enjoy the attendant physical sensations,’ explained a 1922 co-ed in the Ohio State University Lantern. ‘We are “playing the game.”’ The more things change, the more they stay the same.
At the time, acknowledging that sex was something women could actively desire, rather than enter into out of a grudging Victorian sense of marital obligation, was considered … impolite. But attitudes were changing. Influential writings by Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis (who, in addition to providing Emma Goldman with an endlessly quotable quip likening marriage to the sale of sex, was years ahead of his time in proposing that both homosexuality and women’s sexual desire were far from aberrations) were beginning to popularize the idea that sexual desire was an essential component of the human psyche (which was itself subject to a growing amount of interest), and popular culture backed it up.
For example, consider Eleanor Savage. The suggestively named flapper debutante of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise initially bonds with Fitzgerald’s male protagonist/personal stand-in over their shared love of literary dissection. But as she emerges as a potential love interest, she reveals a seen-it-all flavour of romantic jadedness that speaks for the modern woman of the day – or at least, à la Fitzgerald, her rough approximation:
I like clever men and good-looking men, and, of course, no one cares more for personality than I do. Oh, just one person in fifty has any glimmer of what sex is. I’m hipped on Freud and all that, but it’s rotten that every bit of real love in the world is ninety-nine per cent passion and one little soupçon of jealousy.
Eleanor Savage may not have been real, but she was onto something. Until this point in Anglo memory, there hadn’t been a whole lot of attention given to the importance of women’s sexual pleasure.
Married Love, a 1918 treatise by the British scientist Marie Stopes, changed that. Stopes’s book was one of the first popular texts to propose that women’s sexual desire was not only natural and universal, but an attribute that husbands would do well to attend to. Stopes didn’t mince words; most men entered into marriage not knowing how to sexually satisfy a woman, while most women didn’t grasp what the sexual encounter should entail. Stopes describes how sex should involve a real pleasure ‘which should sweep over every wife each time she and her husband unite. The key which unlocks this electric force in his wife must reverently be sought by every husband.’ In the same breath, Stopes made the bold hypothesis that men who had lost their virginity to prostitutes prior to getting married were inclined to mistake their paid sex partner’s yawps and quivers for a testament to their own sexual prowess; these same men were also likely, in turn, to blame their future wives’ lack of sexual arousal on what they perceived was her frigidity instead of their own shortcomings in the sack. (A hubris-tic misconception that many straight women would surely affirm has stood the test of time.)
Married Love sold out so swiftly that it would be reprinted five times within two weeks of its release. Its content was considered so threatening that the US Customs Service banned its American circulation for thirteen years, and not just because people were terrified to consider the meaning of sex. Women’s sexual agency was a disconcerting prospect, particularly when coupled with her burgeoning economic agency. When not under tight social control, what was to become of the family unit upon which a capitalist economy and Judeo-Christian moral order were both, simultaneously, contingent and upheld?
One answer was a new relationship model that demanded an implicit rejection of the values that had governed Western society for millennia: that is, the idea that marriage could be designed to fulfill the companionate and sexual needs of men and women first and foremost. Sexuality, within the regulatory confines of a state-sanctified marriage, would be embraced and even celebrated. Most people found the prospect utterly terrifying.