The 1920s were a time of dramatic
changes characterized by prosperity, new ideas, and personal freedom that
caused profound social change and cultural conflict. Known as the “roaring
twenties” Americans reacted to the depression of World War I, and the culture
became somewhat of a giant party with the rise of consumer culture, the incline
of mass entertainment. America’s
population began shifting from rural areas to more urban ones and the growing
affordability of the automobile made people more mobile than ever. Although the
decade was known as the era of “revolution in morals and manners”[1], under the
surface conservative values still flourished as the nation saw the revival of
the Ku Klux Klan, the end of its open immigration policy, and the controversy
over evolution. The economic boom of the era was short lived, but the social
changes were lasting.
America’s cultural change is most
apparent in the prescience of The Flapper. During this time, “growing up in an
urban environment that afforded Americans opportunities for anonymity and
leisure, born in the era of mass reproduction, the flapper experimented openly
with sex and with style”.[2]
The Flapper’s actions directly defied the rules of her mother’s Victorian
generation. Victorians were appalled by their daughter’s lack of restraint,
daughters like Zelda Sayre. Zelda was the perfect example of a Flapper. She was
“commonly acknowledged as something of a wild child”[3]
as she would boldly assert her right to dance, drink, smoke, date, and
“habitually rouged her cheeks and stenciled her eyes with mascara, giving her
friends’ parents great cause for concern”.[4]
Sexual mores, gender roles, hairstyles, and dress all changed profoundly in the
1920s due to the Flapper. Millions of girls wanted to be Zelda, it was the age
of the Flapper.
The Flapper did not appear out of
think air, she was a product. “She belonged to the first
generations of Americans who were raised on advertisements and amusements
rather than religion and restraint”.[5]
There were many new amusements that were to blame for this cultural change.
First, there was jazz music where the new generation was thought to be “spoiled
by jazz music”[6] and dance halls.
Second, it was new innovations in technology when “the first sign of trouble
came when Americans fell in love with the bicycle” in the 1890s.[7]
Technological innovation became more and more advanced with first the telephone,
which came into wider use in the first decades of the new century and second
came the automobile. The mass production of automobiles and telephones caused
the end of the Victorian Era’s courtship system and culture as more and more
young adults obtained freedom.
Freedom is not only perpetuated by
technological advancements and mobility but also from urbanization and economic
forces. Many young women flooded to cities for employment where they were free
from the surveillance of their Victorian parents. For the first time ever, more
than 50 percent of Americans lived in cities than in the countryside. The mass
entry of women into the workforce due to industrialization and urbanization
meant, “Real money could buy real freedom”.[8]
This then caused for a demand of entertainment and leisure activities for the
newly freed young adults. Places like movie theaters and amusement parts like
Coney Island became big attractions for social gathering. This then meant, “The
apostles of good living were no longer ministers and schoolmasters, but advertising
executives who saturated American Newspapers, magazines, movie theaters, and
radio stations with a new gospel of indulgence”.[9]
The advertisements of this new leisure culture, as perpetuated by the new era
couple Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, meant men and women were ushered in a
culture where sex became more prominent.
Even though there were a lot of
liberal changes in the twenties, many felt insecure about these [10]
The Klan were known to “ruthlessly patrolled back roads in search of teenagers
embroiled in wild petting parties or improper embraces… flogged errant husbands
and wives, and tarred and feathered drunks”.[11]
Although the Klan’s actions were extreme, they represented the fair amount of
Americans that did not accept the cultural revolution of the 1920s. But is even
more interesting is that the 1920s flapper got the most criticism not from
Christian moralists or spokesmen for the older generation, not from politically
conservative men, but from feminists. To them, the New Women like Lois Long and
Zelda, struck many veteran feminists as apolitical who are only interested in
romantic and sexual frivolities and not “important issues like suffrage,
occupational health and safety, income equality, and legal rights”. To many the
new culture was “misguided at best”.[12] |
| Lois Long at Work |
The social changes brought by the
1920s did not disappear. I can see many similarities between the culture then
and now in our generation. For example, a survey of a high school students in
the 1920s revealed the five most frequent sources of disagreement between
teenagers and their parents which were “the number of times you go out on
school nights during the week, the hour you get in at night, grades at school,
your spending money, and the use of the automobile”.[13]
If the same survey were conducted today, the results would be the same. I know
those were some of the issues my parents and I fought over in high school. Also,
characters similar to Lois Long are still prevalent today. In the 1920s, Lois
Long was hired by The New Yorker to
write a regular column on New York nightlife. “Essentially, Long would be the
magazine’s resident flapper journalist… she continued her long nights of
drinking, dining, and dancing and regaled her captive readers with weekly tales
of her adventures on the town”.[14]
Lois Long’s career is identical to that of 21st century icon Carrie
Bradshaw, a character on the hit series “Sex and the City”. Carrie also had a
hit weekly column for a newspaper where she wrote about her and her best
girlfriend’s adventures of sex, dating, society, and all New York has to offer.
People might not be familiar with the name Lois Long, but they will certainly
know Carrie Bradshaw. And finally, lets not forget about the emergence of “the
celebrity”. In the 1920s, the Fitzgeralds came to age in a country that was
increasingly in the thrall of celebrity where sensational murder trials, sports
legends, and movie stars. Today, “the celebrity” like Brad and Angelina Jolie
enjoy similar coverage as that of the Fitzgeralds.
Lois Long said about the roaring
20s: “Tomorrow we may die, so let’s get drunk and make love”. Today, we like to
paraphrase this idea with the popular saying: “You Only Live Once - that’s the
motto YOLO”.
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