by Gail Collins
“WHAT EVERY GIRL SHOULD KNOW”
Margaret Louise Higgins was the middle child in a family of eleven, the daughter of Irish immigrants in Corning, New York. Her father was a stonemason, better at giving speeches about his radical political theories than keeping a job. Her older sisters helped earn money to send Margaret, the family scholar, to a boarding school. She trained to be a nurse, and in 1902 she married Bill Sanger, a young architect. They plunged into Manhattan’s exciting left-wing political community and became regulars at the salon of Mabel Dodge, a wealthy collector of intellectual and artistic celebrities. Even in a permissive circle of friends in a permissive city, Margaret Sanger was apparently well ahead of most women when it came to sexual sophistication. Mabel Dodge called her “the first person I ever knew who was openly an ardent propagandist for the joys of the flesh.”
From early on, the Sanger marriage was troubled. While Margaret was giving birth to three children, Bill Sanger switched to an unprofitable career as an artist, and she resented his failure as a breadwinner. To bring in some money, she went to work for Lillian Wald’s visiting nurses on the Lower East Side. She quickly became familiar with women who were ruining their health with too many pregnancies, just as her own mother had done. For the rest of her life, she would tell the possibly apocryphal story of Sadie Sachs, a poor woman with a small apartment and several small children. Sanger treated her for complications from a self-induced abortion. When Sadie pleaded with a doctor for reliable contraception, Sanger would say, the doctor laughed and advised her to “tell Jake to sleep on the roof.” Three months later she came back to find the woman dying from septicemia from another abortion.
Sanger was asked to write a column on sex education, “What Every Girl Should Know,” for The Call, a daily newspaper with socialist sympathies. When she tackled the subject of venereal disease, her column was banned by Anthony Comstock, who had acquired censorship as well as prosecutorial powers. The paper ran an empty space with the title: “What Every Girl Should Know. Nothing; by order of the U.S. Post Office.” Out of the turmoil of her complicated private and professional lives, Sanger developed a mission—to bring family planning information to American women. Many of her male friends in the labor movement or politics found the crusade either strange or irritating. One night, Sanger and Bill Haywood, the famous labor leader, addressed a group of women strikers. An observer remembered that Sanger spoke of women’s right to limit the size of their families and “received a hearty response” from the audience. Haywood then followed, promising the women that in the glorious economy built by union labor in the future, they would be able to have “all the babies they pleased.” He was greeted by dead silence.
The birth control devices available to women in the first half of the twentieth century weren’t much different from those on sale in the nineteenth, but the information was going to be better. Sanger was the first to evaluate all the available forms of birth control and produce clear explanations of what each one did, and how to use it. Eventually, she fled to Europe to avoid criminal obscenity charges for her work. While she was gone, Bill Sanger was arrested for distributing her pamphlet Family Limitation. “If some persons would go around and urge Christian women to bear children instead of wasting their time on woman suffrage, this city and society would be better off,” the judge told him.
When Margaret returned to the United States, her husband was in jail and newspaper coverage of his case brought the controversy over contraception into public view for the first time—even though the New York Times discreetly refused to tell its readers the exact topic of the pamphlet Sanger was charged with distributing. Two months later the Sangers’ little girl Peggy died suddenly, an event that haunted the guilt-ridden Margaret so much that she could never bear to remain in the presence of another mother and daughter. But to the public, the tragedy made both the Sangers martyrs for their cause and Anthony Comstock their persecutor. In the end, Bill Sanger got thirty days in prison, and Comstock got a chill attending the trial, which led to a fatal case of pneumonia.
Despite their political victory, the Sangers’ marriage was over but a new phase of Margaret’s public career was about to begin. In 1916, she rented a storefront in Brooklyn and on October 16, she wrote: “I opened the doors of the first birth control clinic in America…. Halfway to the corner they were standing in line, at least one hundred and fifty, some shawled, some hatless, their red hands clasping the cold, chapped smaller ones of their children.” Margaret and her sister Ethel, a nurse, charged 10 cents for consultations. In the few weeks the clinic was able to operate, the staff saw 464 women. But Margaret and her sister were arrested for selling a sex education pamphlet to an undercover policewoman and carted off to jail. As the police wagon drove them away, some of their clients loyally followed behind, walking down the street with their children in hand.
15
The Twenties: All the Liberty You Can Use in the Backseat of a Packard
“FLAPPERS ARE BRAVE AND GAY AND BEAUTIFUL”
Margaret Mead arrived at DePauw University in Indiana in 1919, expecting to “take part in an intellectual feast.” But instead, Mead found the other coeds wearing muskrat coats and sorority pins. They were the first members of their family to go to college, and they were determined to enjoy the experience. “It was a college to which students had come for fraternity life, for football games and for establishing the kind of rapport with other people that would make them…good members of the garden club,” sniffed Mead. A spiritual daughter of the Jane Addams era, Mead had stumbled into the advance guard of the flapper decade.
American women were transformed after World War I. They seemed to embody the changes going on in the country itself. The United States went from a young industrial state that was accumulating the capital to build factories and railroads to a world power with a consumer economy that relied on its citizens to keep the boom going by borrowing money and buying homes and cars. Meanwhile, the celibate settlement house worker was replaced as a female prototype by the jazz-crazed flapper dancing the Charleston in a speakeasy. Everything that had anything to do with consumption was in style. That included drinking, smoking, and sex—for women as well as men. Anything that reeked of “reform” was out. “‘Feminism’ has become a term of opprobrium to the modern young woman,” wrote the essayist Dorothy Dunbar Bromley in 1927. “For the word suggests 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.”
Not every young woman in America was committing herself to drinking gin and sneering at anyone in flat shoes. Mead transferred from DePauw to Barnard College in Manhattan, where she found “the kind of student life that matched my earlier dreams” and began the studies that would turn her into a world-famous anthropologist. Most girls in America belonged to poor rural or immigrant or African American families, and they had more pressing concerns than whether or not to pledge a sorority. But the educated middle-class women with “causes” who had been setting the national agenda before World War I no longer captured much attention. Their daughters were interested in a different form of liberation—the kind that gave them the right to enjoy themselves in the same ways men did. “Flaming youth had just caught fire,” wrote Ernestine and Frank Gilbreth in Cheaper by the Dozen. “It was the day of the flapper and the sheik, of petting and necking, of flat chests and dimpled knees. It was yellow slickers with writing on the back…. ‘Collegiate’ was the most complimentary adjective in the American vocabulary…. The accepted mode of transportation was the stripped down Model T Ford, preferably inscribed with such witticisms as…‘The Mayflower—Many a Little Puritan Has Come Across in It.’”
It was a disturbing time for the older generation who had grown up believing that they had a duty to make the world better. Women professors found themselves out of sympathy with the
students they were teaching—Vida Scudder of Wellesley thought the 1920s were the bleakest years of her professional career. Marjorie Nicolson of Columbia looked out over the sleek heads of her female students and decided that her own era had been “the only generation of women which ever found itself.” Jane Addams said girls’ “astounding emphasis on sex” was disquieting, given the unique social contribution the “educated unmarried woman” had made for the last fifty years. It was exactly the sort of statement that Dorothy Dunbar Bromley found passé.
The younger women returned the disdain. A much-quoted article by “an ex-feminist” entitled “The Harm My Education Did Me” excoriated female academics as withered, bitter man-haters who were warping their charges with “artificial standards of bygone feminists.” The idea of finding one’s personal satisfaction among a community of women went out the window. As women strove to become comrades and pals with the men in their lives, it sometimes seemed as if they had left no emotional space for anyone else. “I think a woman gets more happiness out of being gay, light-hearted, unconventional, mistress of her own fate than out of a career that calls for hard work, intellectual pessimism and loneliness,” said Zelda Fitzgerald, whose husband, F. Scott, turned her into the emblem of the twenties. She expressed the hope that her own infant daughter would not become “a genius.”
“I want her to be a flapper, because flappers are brave and gay and beautiful,” Zelda said.
“SKINNY AND FLAT-CHESTED AND POPULAR”
The word flapper had been used to describe everything from a gawky preadolescent to unbuckled galoshes, but in America it became the all-purpose designation for the girl of the hour. The flapper was energetic, daring, and self-absorbed. She defined herself by her unrestrained clothing. She did not wear a corset, and she bared her arms. Her skirts went up to her knees, and she sometimes rolled down her sheer stockings, exposing her skin. But she hid her breasts. Her dresses hung straight down from the shoulders, and while she never used tight undergarments to sheathe her slim hips and middle, a flapper who had the bad luck to be amply endowed did bind her breasts so she could have the requisite flat shape. It was a peculiar combination of sexuality and boyishness and every young woman who was not very, very serious wanted to be part of the excitement, no matter what her race, class, or economic status. A survey in Milwaukee in 1927 found only 70 of 1,300 working girls still wearing a corset.
“That’s what’s the matter with this generation. Nobody thinks about being smart or clever or sweet or even attractive. No sir, they want to be skinny and flat-chested and popular,” bellowed Frank Gilbreth, the father of the authors of Cheaper by the Dozen when his oldest daughter, Anne, declared: “I’m never going to wear long underwear again.” Like parents all over the country, the Gilbreths eventually gave in and allowed their daughters to buy silk stockings and flimsy underwear and bob their hair, although according to the authors, when Anne arrived at the dinner table with her new haircut, her mother dropped the peas and burst into tears. At first, a bobbed head was seen as a sign of dangerous radicalism. When the manager of the Palm Garden in New York rented his hall to a left-wing group whose meeting ended in a riot in 1918, he defended himself by saying the woman who signed the lease was well dressed and drove a nice car. He added: “Had we noticed then, as we do now, that she had short hair, we would have refused.”
The underlying impulse was freedom—from the mores of the past that required women to keep themselves in check, physically and emotionally. The woman of the twenties was supposed to be a “pal” to her male friends and later her husband. She was not going to keep the hearth warm while her mate was out carousing. She was out there with him. She needed to be physically free to dance the wild, flapping dances of the moment, play golf, drive a car, and leap up and down at football games. In summer, one commentator of the era noted that men were now wearing “four times as much clothes by weight as women.” Rebellion was not just in the wind, it was in the junior section at local department stores. It was intended, in part, to drive the older generation crazy, and it succeeded. The president of the University of Florida predicted: “The low-cut gowns, the rolled hose and short skirts are born of the devil and his angels and are carrying the present and future generations to chaos and destruction.” In the Ohio legislature, someone introduced a bill prohibiting any female over fourteen from wearing skirts that did not “reach to that part of the foot known as the instep.” The head of a Wisconsin tuberculosis sanatorium announced that short skirts led to TB.
It was a losing battle. Not only did American girls want to look like flappers, they convinced many of their mothers to do the same. “Ten years ago women still had ages…. Today mother and daughter maybe found…supplementing their wardrobe from the same rack,” complained the Chicago Tribune in 1928. In the past, women regarded aging as inevitable and believed that if they stayed youthful, it was a special blessing from God. Now it was an act of will. Hair could be dyed, cheeks made artificially rosy, and skin moisturized until it sloshed. “Thanks to cosmetics the mother of today is more the big sister and enjoys and appreciates the pleasures of her daughter,” explained an analyst for the industry, which had become the fourth biggest business in the United States—behind cars, movies, and bootlegged liquor.
By 1927, a survey found that 50 percent of women wore rouge and 90 percent wore face powder. Everyone from teenagers to middle-aged matrons carried compacts in their purses, and powdering one’s nose became a reflexive act, required whenever a woman moved from one activity to another. (Aviatrix Ruth Elder was forced to make an emergency landing while flying across the Atlantic, and when she emerged from her plane, she immediately powdered her nose.) The advertising industry bombarded women with products to make them more beautiful. Many of the ads were written by women who had come of age in the earlier feminist era, and some of their efforts had a strange mixture of the old rhetoric and the new priorities. One Ponds cold cream ad featured an endorsement by Alva Belmont, the socialite-turned-suffragist. “Mrs. Belmont has not only given lavishly to women’s causes from her colossal fortune…but also is particularly interested in woman’s special problem of how to keep her force and charm throughout her life,” it enthused. Since Alva refused to let her photograph be used, the ad was illustrated with a picture of her library.
“A LOT OF LASHING AND LATHER”
The double standard that women reformers had fought against for so long was finally in retreat. But instead of forcing men to follow the same rules of chastity as women, society lowered the bar for girls. The new national pastimes were necking and petting—terms that seemed to cover behavior ranging from nuzzling to everything short of intercourse. “Nice” girls, abetted by the privacy of the automobile, allowed their boyfriends to put their hands and mouths places that previous generations would never have considered—or at least never admitted to. A writer for Survey magazine reported in 1925 that when young women came out of work, they were being picked up by “gas hawks” (young men in automobiles) who “pet them even in the street. They have done it outside my window with an enthusiasm which even two large paper bags filled with water and hurled against their windshield…failed to cool.” In the definitive 1920s novel, This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s hero, the self-absorbed Princetonian Amory Blaine, “saw girls doing things that even in his memory would have been impossible.” None of the mothers, Amory was sure, “had any idea how casually their girls were accustomed to be kissed.”
The “belle” who had a half-dozen callers every afternoon and never allowed herself to be alone with any one man until she was engaged was succeeded by the “baby vamp” who disappeared with her partner between dances and returned looking rather flushed and rumpled. Some young women regarded the new norms as rather noble. “The girl with sport in her blood…kisses the boys, she smokes with them, she drinks with them, and why? Because the feeling of comradeship is running rampant,” wrote an Ohio State coed. “The girl does not stand aloof. She and the man meet on common gro
und, and yet can she not retain her moral integrity?”
More women—perhaps a third—were having sex before marriage, and surveys of college men indicated they no longer felt it was essential to marry a virgin. Young men were much more likely to be having premarital sex with their girlfriends, and as a result they were only about half as likely as their fathers to visit prostitutes. It was yet another example of how purity reformers should have been careful what they wished for. Nevertheless, the social convention that sexual intercourse should be saved for marriage—or at least engagement—generally held firm. An editor of the Duke University newspaper in 1927 described the sexual activities of most coeds as “a lot of lashing and lather on the surface with miles of unmoved depths below.”
Middle-class girls were following the lead of working-class girls, who had been going on “dates” since the 1890s, while their more affluent peers were still receiving callers at home. Obviously, a girl who lived in a small tenement apartment could not receive gentlemen friends in the midst of the crowd of relatives and boarders who lived there, too. There was also a kind of rough justice to the idea of having a boy “treat” for a night at the movies or a dance since boys were generally not required to turn their paychecks over to their parents as the girls did. Perhaps most important, dating was a demonstration of popularity—for girls in college as well as in factories. Dates became the social equivalent of scalps on a girl’s belt—the number of dates and the quality of suitors was the way young women defined their desirability. Nevertheless, when calling ended and dating began, girls lost a certain amount of power. The etiquette of the earlier period gave girls the right to decide which young men would be invited to call. With dating, men took the initiative, and the fact that they paid for the evening gave them even more control.