by Gail Collins
After a century of enforced innocence, women in the 1920s were expected to know all about sex. Sigmund Freud had lectured in America in 1909, and by World War I almost everybody had read magazine articles about his theories. A college friend told Margaret Mead that “the man you marry will certainly have an Oedipal fixation on you, which will be all right if it isn’t joined to an incest complex.” Another of Fitzgerald’s heroines sighed: “I’m hipped on Freud and all that, but it’s rotten that every bit of real love in the world is ninety-nine percent passion and one little soupçon of jealousy.” By 1920, 200 books about Freudianism had been published in America, and if the average student’s understanding of the subject was shallow, she picked up enough to be convinced that sex was the center of everything for women as well as men.
The era when even abstention within marriage was regarded as healthy was most definitely over. Everybody wanted a “companionate” marriage, in which husband and wife were both pals and inventive sexual partners. Given the declining birthrate, people were obviously using birth control, and Lysol became a popular douche after its makers started running ads hinting that their product not only cleaned floors, it was useful as protection against “calendar fear.” But the most effective protection was a diaphragm and spermicidal jelly. Germany manufactured the best diaphragms, and Margaret Sanger’s second husband, Noah Slee, a motor oil magnate, shipped tons of them to his plant in Montreal and smuggled them into the country in Three-in-One Oil drums.
Until World War I, Americans had been so naïve about homosexuality that lesbians could live together without ever raising eyebrows. But in the twenties, women living together were assumed to be having sex even if they weren’t, and people began wondering if all-female colleges were unhealthy. At Barnard, Margaret Mead and her friends “worried and thought over affectionate episodes in our past relationships with girls and wondered if they had been incipient examples.” In 1926, a play about lesbianism, The Captive, became a critical and popular hit on Broadway. (Since it portrayed lesbianism as a terrible, but uncontrollable, curse, the audience could enjoy being titillated while feeling morally superior.) But as time went on, people began to notice that the bulk of the ticket-buyers were young girls. The critic George Jean Nathan withdrew his endorsement when a friend reported that “he and apparently a mere handful of males in the house, felt embarrassingly conspicuous amidst such an overwhelmingly feminine assemblage.”
“SOAP TO MATCH HER BATHROOM’S COLOR SCHEME”
By the 1920s, most American women had completely broken from the pioneer past and the burdens of Victorian domesticity. Martha Farnsworth, a middle-class Topeka housewife, got indoor plumbing in 1903, took her first automobile ride in 1907, and got a telephone in 1908. By 1920, she had electric lights in her house, an electric iron, a vacuum cleaner, and a record player and was yearning to take an airplane ride. She occasionally recalled, with wonder, that as a child she had been afraid of Indians and wolves and spent her days herding the family oxen.
For the first time, most middle-class Americans had not only running water in their homes, but the full system of sinks and drains and toilets and sewers. By 1927 nearly two-thirds of American homes had electricity, and women were using it to power vacuum cleaners, ranges, refrigerators, toasters, and irons. The washing machine was still a work in progress, but many women sent their clothes to laundries, where business was at an all-time peak. American woman’s most celebrated job was that of consumer-in-chief. “Today’s woman gets what she wants,” enthused an advertisement in the Chicago Tribune. “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.” The ad industry begged for her attention; the department stores spoiled her with extra services. Women didn’t have to carry packages—all their purchases were sent to a central desk, wrapped together, and turned over to the free and frequent delivery service. Customers sometimes got carried away by the attention and made ridiculous demands, insisting that the bones from their lunch be wrapped and delivered free to their dogs at home, or that a specially altered suit be returned because it arrived at 1:30 instead of 1:00.
Pregnant women were no longer supposed to stay home from the first moment the baby began to show. Ready-to-wear maternity clothes had been in the stores since 1910, and the New York Herald printed ads that announced: “It is no longer the fashion or the practice for expectant mothers to stay in seclusion.” When it was time to deliver, more women went to the hospital, drawn by the promise that they could sleep through the entire experience: “Two yellow capsules, a jab in the arm, swiftly blot out the scene, time, knowledge and feeling for the woman…. When she is not aware, sunlight pierces the drapery. And one of the amiable nurses chirps: ‘It’s all over. You’ve got your baby.’” Even though women were less likely to fear the pain, they knew having a baby was still potentially dangerous. During World War I, the number of American women who died from the effects of childbirth was greater than the number of men who died on the battlefield. It was an in-between period in medical progress: Doctors understood about germs and the nation had been introduced to the importance of “vital-amines,” but there was still no penicillin and not many vaccines. Children could be healthy one day, and on death’s door the next from pneumonia or a common childhood ailment—like Margaret Sanger’s little girl. Half a million Americans died in the influenza epidemic after World War I.
The first successful sanitary napkins went on sale in 1921, in what must have been one of the most important unheralded moments in the history of American women. The Kimberly-Clark Company had manufactured bandages made out of wood pulp for army hospitals in World War I. American nurses used them when they had their periods and raved about their absorbency and disposability. After the war, the firm began selling the bandages under the name Kotex in pharmacies and department stores—where they were often marketed in the corset department. An early ad, signed by a registered nurse, praised the product’s “Immaculacy” and “clean exquisiteness under circumstances which most women find exceedingly trying.” It was the new openness about sexual issues that allowed Kotex to connect with the female population. Other companies had attempted to market “Hygienic Towelettes for Ladies” since the 1890s but found it difficult to get magazines or newspapers to run their ads.
Most women had been using washable pads or rags until then, and one of the reasons women stuck so long to black skirts and multitudinous petticoats may have been the desire to wear several layers of clothes in case of accidents. A “Women’s Comfort Sanitary Traveling Set” marketed by Sears in 1914 included washable pads, a belt, a waterproof pouch to carry the used pads in, and an apron made with cloth-covered rubber, which was supposed to hang like the back half of a skirt beneath the petticoats, protecting them from staining. The Kotex ads, in contrast, frequently cheered “Nothing to launder!” and promised an end to “discomfort and uncertainty.” The disposability factor also probably encouraged girls to change their napkins more frequently—the turn-of-the-century rule had been once in the morning and once at bedtime.
“REACH FOR A LUCKY INSTEAD OF A SWEET”
Women took up smoking in the twenties with the same suddenness they cut their hair and raised their skirts. They smoked in restaurants, in speakeasies, in the country clubs where they went to play golf and bridge, and in private homes during that new invention, the cocktail hour. For the younger generation, smoking was another example of “freedom” and women’s right to enjoy the same pleasures as men. But they got a prod from the mass media. Magazine ads urged weight-conscious flappers to “reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.” Cigarettes, which had frequently been marketed as a health aid that would cure nervousness or aid indigestion, became a weapon in the war against fat.
Dieting became an obsession in the twenties, as young women struggled to achieve the wraithlike forms necessary to look good in a flapper’s outfit, and their mothers tried to stay thin enough
to continue shopping in the junior’s department. (A child of the era horrified her mother by looking at a picture of Lillian Russell and asking: “Who is that fat lady?”) Meat consumption in restaurants dropped 50 percent in the decade. The Victorian breakfast, with its endless array of food, completely gave way to cereal and juice, and lunch became a sandwich. There were strange drugs on the market like Marmola, which was made from the dried thyroid glands of various animals. If you used it, the ads promised, you could abandon “table restraint” and still stay slim.
Restraint was something women were encouraged to exercise only when it came to eating. In the flapper ethos, drinking, even to excess, was no longer considered shocking. “When I was a boy, girls of their upbringing weren’t allowed to move a step without chaperones or personal maids, and a spoonful of eggnog on New Year’s Day was the extent of their drinking. Now they stand up at the bar and order whiskey sours like seasoned cannoneers,” wrote Heywood Broun in Harper’s. It was fashionable for men and women to swig gin out of the same hip flask.
Prohibition, which went into effect by constitutional amendment in 1919, had not worked out the way the women reformers had expected, although it actually was successful in a limited way. People like Frances Willard had hoped that banning alcohol would reduce the amount of drinking in poor and immigrant homes where women suffered so much from their drunken husbands. To some extent, that happened in neighborhoods where people could not afford bootleg whisky. But the temperance women had never expected their own class to cheerfully flout the law in massive numbers. Some of them lost enthusiasm for Prohibition when they realized that rather than eliminating the danger that their sons would drink, the Eighteenth Amendment had extended the peril to their daughters. Pauline Sabine, a socialite who switched sides to the repeal movement, said: “Many of our members are young mothers—too young to remember the old saloon. But they are working for repeal because they don’t want their babies to grow up in the hip flask, speakeasy atmosphere that has polluted their own youth.”
“SPLINTERED INTO A HUNDRED FRAGMENTS”
Giving women the right to vote did not have unanticipated consequences like Prohibition. In fact, the shock for suffragists was that it hardly seemed to have any consequences at all. Most women appeared to vote the way their husbands, brothers, and fathers did—not necessarily because they felt obliged to follow the men’s lead, but because they shared the same loyalties to class, ethnic group, and region. Like many newly enfranchised groups, women were also voting less frequently than those who had been at it for a long time. In 1920, when American women went to the polls across the nation for the first time, they made up an estimated one-third of the voters. Mainly, they voted for Warren Harding, who turned out to be one of the worst presidents in American history. He had stuffed his platform with female-friendly promises like equal pay for equal work, an end to child labor, and more women appointees to government positions. But his attraction was probably the same for both sexes—the promise of a return to “normalcy” after the war and the turmoil that followed it.
The most surprising development was the virtual disappearance, almost overnight, of the political movement that had forced the government to approve woman suffrage in the first place. “The American women’s movement…is splintered into a hundred fragments under as many warring leaders,” mourned Frances Kellor, a reformer. The National American Woman Suffrage Association, Carrie Chapman Catt’s group, turned itself into the League of Women Voters, and its membership plunged to one-tenth of what it was. But women had their reasons for dropping out of politics. Prohibition was a discouraging lesson in the difficulty of legislating morality. And the twenties were not a good time for anything that smacked of political reform. The nation had been traumatized by race riots and labor violence, and since the war some people had gotten in the habit of responding to any whiff of disturbance by smashing down anyone who looked different. A man in Indiana was shot to death for saying “To hell with the United States,” and a jury took only minutes to acquit his killer. The Radcliffe debating team came under fire from the vice president of the United States when the students successfully defended the proposition that collective bargaining for unions was a good thing. In 1924, the first two women were elected governors, and both were uninspiring stand-ins for their husbands. Nellie Tayloe Ross, the widow of the governor of Wyoming, had not even wanted her husband to run for office, and when he died suddenly, the Democrats nominated her to fill out his term without her permission. “Ma” Ferguson of Texas ran for office when her husband was impeached. Her signature achievement as governor was to pardon an average of 100 criminals a month in what critics claimed was a fee-for-freedom scheme.
For a while, the specter of the “women’s vote” frightened male politicians, who had no idea what these newly enfranchised females wanted. In 1920, Warren Harding’s handlers were worried that women would react badly to rumors that the Republican presidential candidate had black ancestors, and they started publishing glorified versions of the Harding family tree for the edification of puzzled Americans, most of whom hadn’t heard the rumor and none of whom appeared to care. On a more elevated plane, in 1921 Congress passed the Sheppard-Towner Maternity Act, the first step toward reformers’ dream of a national system of well-baby clinics to improve the health of the poor. But physicians felt it threatened their practices, and by the end of the 1920s, when it became clear that women were not going to vote as a bloc, the program was phased out.
“TOO MUCH PERSONALITY”
People had always spent much of their lives sitting at home in silence—the ability to play the piano was a feminine accomplishment of great significance because it gave families a chance to listen to something besides the sound of their own voices. Then in 1921, there was radio. “It came with a rush,” said Frederick Allen, in a look back at the twenties he published soon after the decade was over. By 1929, a third of all American households were listening to radio, the vast majority every day.
At first, the men did most of the listening. Boys gathered in living rooms or garages with headphones over their ears, carefully manipulating a thin wire and crystal to bring in music and voices from far away. But a lot of women were involved on the other end, producing, writing scripts, booking guests, emceeing the programs, and often serving as the program itself, by delivering book reviews, culture reports, or anything else they concocted to fill the time. It would have been surprising if they hadn’t been active, since early radio was exactly the sort of operation—disorganized, badly paid, and in great need of multitasking—that welcomed creative women. In 1925, a journalist named Gwen Wagner reminisced for Radio Age about the “days of yore”—1921—when she ran radio station WPO in Memphis. Wagner worked for the newspaper that sponsored the station and, in addition to her regular journalism duties, “wrote all the material for the radio column, engaged the radio artists and arranged the programs. At night I went out to the studio and broadcast.” But once radio became a moneymaking success, women stopped being asked to serve as announcers or to deliver the news. Their on-air role was limited mainly to singing or acting in soap operas. Industry executives claimed that female voices did not broadcast well and one much-quoted poll of 5,000 listeners showed men’s voices were preferred 100 to 1. The manager of the station that conducted the poll theorized women’s voices had “too much personality.”
In the movies, where performers were seen and not heard, the biggest early stars were actresses. More than any other decade, the movies of the 1920s stressed plots that appealed to women—romances and melodramas over action adventures and comedies—and many of the most successful early screenwriters were women. (Frances Marion, a Hollywood legend, used her two Academy Awards as doorstops.) Although salary-conscious studios tried hard to keep their actors and actresses anonymous, the public instantly glommed on to a few familiar faces, particularly that of “the girl with the curls.” Mary Pickford, who specialized in playing spunky child-heroines, received 500 fan letters a day by
1915. A professional actress since her actual childhood, Pickford had always been her family’s meal ticket, and she was a tough contract negotiator who managed to become one of the very few women to get a foothold in the production end of the business, as a founding partner of United Artists. But on-screen the public demanded that she remain a golden-haired girl, and she played children’s roles well into her thirties. Her private life was slightly less tidy than her film personas, and though she kept her marriage to fellow actor Owen Moore a secret, she could not really cover up the fact that she had deserted him for the also-married screen star Douglas Fairbanks. (Fairbanks was so nervous about the scandal that he denounced rumors of the romance as German propaganda during World War I.) After they finally divorced their respective mates and ran off to Europe to marry in 1920, Pickford looked out of her London hotel window and saw the streets crammed with “thousands and thousands” of people who had been waiting just to get a glimpse of the girl with the curls and her dashing swashbuckler of a husband. “Come home—all is forgiven,” begged Photoplay from the other side of the Atlantic. This was the beginning of the era of movie magazines and tabloid movie columns, when most Americans went to the movies at least once a week, and ordinary women around the country would identify with the heroines they saw on the screen, striving to be perky like Pickford, or dangerous like Theda Bara. (In a fairly typical effort, The Rose of Blood, Bara played a spy in the Russian Revolution who, as one reviewer explained, “wrecks hearts, railroad trains, slays one after another and concludes the fifth reel by blowing up the peace cabinet, which includes her husband.”)
Men and women went to the movies with equal enthusiasm, but women spent much more time reading, thinking, and talking about movie stars. Gossip, for all its destructive potential, had always been an important way for women to bond with one another, affirm their social values, express insights about human character, and experiment with new ideas about what was and was not permissible behavior. In a world where fewer people lived in small towns and shared mutual acquaintances, the film stars created a common national neighborhood that everyone could visit. Mary Pickford was an entire week’s worth of coffee chat all by herself. When she bobbed her hair in a desperate attempt to get her fans to accept her as an adult actress, the country was aghast, and things were never the same between the public and Mary again.