thesis statement on the 1920s

US History: Resources by Decade: 1920s

1920s: resources from database u.s. history in context (gale).

• U.S. History in Context (Gale): 1920s This link contains a variety of content (e.g. an overview, academic journals, primary sources, images, references) on the 1920s.

Barnett, Thomas P. (American architect, 1870-1929), Role: painter. (Work: 1922, Era: CE, Image Date: 1989). Riches of the Mines, detail view. [mural paintings (visual works)].  https://library.artstor.org/public/SS7732236_7732236_12897144

Ebooks and Print Books: USA in 1920s

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AP®︎/College US History

Course: ap®︎/college us history   >   unit 7.

• 1920s consumption
• American culture in the 1920s

1920s: innovations in communication and technology

“The year 1870 represented modern America at dawn. Over the subsequent six decades, every aspect of life experienced a revolution. By 1929, urban America was electrified and almost every urban dwelling was networked, connected to the outside world with electricity, natural gas, telephone, clean running water, and sewers. By 1929, the horse had almost vanished from urban streets, and the ratio of motor vehicles to the number of households reached 90 percent. By 1929, the household could enjoy entertainment options that were beyond the 1870 imagination, including phonograph music, radio, and motion pictures exhibited in ornate movie palaces.”

-Source: Robert J. Gordon, economist, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: the U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War, 2016

• (Choice A)   the increase in investigative journalism A the increase in investigative journalism
• (Choice B)   the rise of consumer culture B the rise of consumer culture
• (Choice C)   the passage of new tariffs C the passage of new tariffs
• (Choice D)   the migration to the Sunbelt D the migration to the Sunbelt

clock This article was published more than  3 years ago

100 years ago: An election, a virus and a cry from disillusioned youths

The age was ‘ruined...knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up.’ For some, it feels like history repeating itself.

A critical election loomed. The country was deep in recession. And a deadly virus had infected hundreds of thousands of Americans, including the president.

The country was bitterly divided, and there had been deadly and widespread racial strife. The world was “a wreck,” a young college graduate wrote — “knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up.”

“We have seen hideous peculation, greed, [and] anger,” he wrote. “We have seen entire social systems overthrown, and our own called in question.”

It was 1920, and the author was John F. Carter Jr., the 23-year-old son of a minister, who was just out of Yale, and who in later life would be a fixture in Washington political circles.

His essay, “These Wild Young People,” in the Atlantic Monthly that September, was the cry of a disenchanted generation, “faced with staggering problems [in] a badly damaged world.”

It was also a prologue to the Roaring Twenties, the legendary decade of glittering excess, great literature and technological revolution.

As another election looms amid economic and social turmoil, and another pandemic claims American lives, a look back at the 1920s may be instructive for the 2020s.

This was the dawn of the Jazz Age, a time marked by the cynicism born of the catastrophe of World War I, and the cultural upheaval that followed.

“Torn nerves craved the anodynes of speed, excitement, and passion,” the historian Frederick Lewis Allen wrote of the period.

The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have called it “the most expensive orgy in history.”

It was the era of champagne and raccoon coats, spit curls and “makin’ whoopee.”

There was radical change in culture, morals, music and dance.

“The music is sensuous, the embracing of partners — the female only half dressed — absolutely indecent,” the Cincinnati Catholic Telegraph complained, according to Allen. “And the motions — they are such as may not be described … in a family newspaper.”

“Our music is distinctly barbaric,” Carter wrote.

He was speaking, perhaps, of jazz, the rowdy new genre that gave its name to the period.

In 1922, Fitzgerald, 26 — “the amazing young Fitzgerald,” Carter called him — published “Tales of the Jazz Age,” a collection of short stories.

“Never had there been such splendor in the great city,” one story began.

Women had just won the right to vote in 1920, a right that would play a crucial role in another election a century later.

“Freedom of action, liberty of thought, the rights of individuals — all these … surround us, threaten us, excite us, and tempt us,” an anonymous young woman wrote in the Atlantic that year.

But Prohibition, the constitutional ban on the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages , also had gone into effect in 1920, with relatively little debate, Allen recounted.

Carter, though, lamented the “perils of tame living,” and wrote of a “A draconian code … being formulated at Washington.”

Alcohol continued to be available illegally via bootlegging, drug prescription and the efforts of organized crime. And its consumption became a signature of the times — “a sexy, mysterious, splendidly illicit thing,” the scholar Julie M. Irwin has written.

Other cultural change was afoot.

Hundreds of thousands of African Americans, hoping for better lives, had begun the Great Migration, leaving the poverty and racial oppression of the rural South and heading to cities in the North.

But they were greeted with waves of racial violence — lynchings, riots, and a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.

In 1921, mobs of White vigilantes attacked a Black neighborhood in Tulsa, burning looting and killing possibly hundreds of people.

Scientists find a mass grave in Tulsa that might be from 1921 race massacre

And in 1925, 30,000 robed Klansmen marched through the streets of Washington and were cheered by onlookers.

Amid the social convulsions, advances in technology were dizzying.

In 1919, radio broadcasting had been almost unheard of, Allen, the historian, wrote. But much like the Internet and the cellphone, radio would shortly “alter the daily habits of Americans … profoundly,” he wrote.

A pioneering broadcast station had been opened in East Pittsburgh on Nov. 2, 1920, to carry election returns, he wrote. Within a year, the radio “craze” had taken off.

“There is radio music in the air, every night, everywhere,” a San Francisco newspaper reported.

In 1922, sales of radio sets, parts and accessories amounted to about $60 million, Allen reported in his book, “Only Yesterday, An Informal History of the 1920s.” By 1929, the figure was $842 million, roughly $11 billion today.

Soon, radio had penetrated “every third home in the country … and tenement-house roofs [were] covered with forests of antennae,” Allen wrote.

Stunning feats of aviation made front-page headlines.

By 1919, two British aviators, John Alcock and Arthur Brown, had already made the sensational first nonstop flight across the Atlantic. They flew from Newfoundland in a twin engine, open-cockpit biplane and landed in a bog in Ireland.

The achievement “was the final goal of all the ambitions which flying men have ventured to dream,” the New York Tribune announced.

The Tribune was wrong.

That same year, a New York Hotel owner, Raymond Orteig, offered $25,000 — roughly $370,000 today — for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris. Competition was fierce and claimed several lives.

Finally, in 1927, former airmail pilot Charles Lindbergh completed the trip , won the prize and became an international hero.

As the election of 1920, approached, the global influenza pandemic was still killing people across the country, although it seemed to be tapering off.

Some people wore masks, but there was insufficient quarantining. More than 600,000 eventually would die.

President Woodrow Wilson had a frightening case of the influenza at the post-World War I peace talks in Paris. The severity of his condition was kept from the public.

His personal secretary, eldest daughter and members of the Secret Service also became ill.

By the fall of 1920 Wilson sat in the White House partly paralyzed, but not by the flu.

In October 1919, he had suffered a severe stroke, collapsing on the bathroom floor after an exhausting cross-country train journey to gain approval of the League of Nations, according to the biographer A. Scott Berg.

The effort was doomed. And although Wilson was an invalid, he had still wanted the Democratic Party nomination for a third term in 1920.

But he was too frail. And Democrats chose Ohio Gov. James M. Cox to head their ticket, and picked as running mate, a 38-year-old former assistant secretary of the Navy named Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Republicans nominated the genial U.S. Sen. Warren G. Harding, of Ohio, and Massachusetts Gov. Calvin Coolidge as his running mate.

Harding, who historians say had at least two extramarital affairs and had fathered a daughter with a mistress, campaigned on the theme “Return to normalcy.”

Before Trump and Stormy Daniels, a wild presidency

“Harding looked back with longing eyes to the good old days when the government didn’t bother business men with unnecessary regulations, but provided them with fat tariffs,” Allen wrote. He “was for America first.”

But he was unsuited for the presidency. Treasury Secretary William McAdoo called Harding’s speeches “an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea.” And his administration would be marred by scandal.

Still, on Nov. 2, 1920, he was elected in a landslide — and announced that he was going on vacation.

The Washington Post said it had been terrible idea for Wilson “to commit the United States to a course of folly in merging its identity with other nations in a chimerical league of nations.”

“All hail the newly elected President,” the paper said.

As for John F. Carter, the Atlantic essayist, he went on to a distinguished career as an author, columnist and New Deal confidant of President Franklin Roosevelt and, later, Harry Truman.

“We’re men and women, long before our time,” he had declared at the start of the decade. “Mistakes will be made, but we shall at least make them intelligently.”

Black soldiers faced racism home and abroad

In 1918, the flu infected the White House. Even President Wilson got sick.

Women’s history shrine donates artifacts to Library of Congress and National Park Service

1920s Research Project (Ms. Gerry): Home

• Works Cited
• Sample MLA 8 Paper

Directions :

1. Choose one topic from the upper tab.

2. Search in the databases for your topic. (Note: you need to use two articles)

3. Take notes in the Note-Taking Sheet .  Look for helpful quotations and facts. Copy and paste the citations into the Note-Taking Sheet (in Schoology) AND MyBib.com .

4. Develop a strong  thesis   statement  about your topic. How did (your topic) reflect or change the 1920s? Or why was (your topic) important in the 1920s? See examples to the right.  Support your claim with  factual information  from your research. You should have three subtopics .

5. Draft a minimum five paragraph essay about your topic. (You may want make an outline first).  Include an introduction , at least  three body paragraphs (three subtopics) , and a conclusion .

6. Use MyBib for citations and attach your Works Cited to the last page.

Video Tutorials!

Did you miss something?  View the video of today's class:

Overview MyBib.com

Gale Virtual Reference Library  is a collection of 336 reference encyclopedias. Type in  your topic  and  1920s .  Home login:   montytech1     

Short Analysis Template

For a copy of the short analysis template,  click here.

How to Write the Short Analysis Essay

• React personally, however, do no use personal pronouns. Never write: “In my opinion…” Or “I think…”
• Put order to your argument, starting with the least compelling evidence and building to the most impressive point. 
• Use evidence from all articles to support your opinion. 

Short analysis format:

Introduction Paragraph:

• Write an interesting “hook” sentence that makes the reader want to read on.
• Briefly state the main points of your essay. Provide some background for your thesis.
• Strong statement of thesis. What you argue in your essay?

Examples of the beginnings of thesis statements:

• The Great Depression transformed American society in fundamental ways such...
• The 1930s witnessed a complete change in the way women worked due to ....
• Harper Lee was instrumental in breaking barriers in ... and .... with her classic novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.

Supporting Paragraphs:

• For each supporting paragraph bring down a briefly stated main point & then elaborate.
• Use your voice to discuss the prompt and the main point.
• Use evidence from the article to support your ideas.
• Discuss one point per supporting paragraph.
• Use both articles in your essay.  Choose one that you feel more strongly about.  Use the other article to dismiss 
• Incorporate in-text citations from the article.  Use  lead-in words  such as "According to," "As stated by," etc.  
• Use transition words to make the supporting paragraphs flow such as furthermore, in addition, moreover, first, second, third, finally, again, also, and, besides, further, in the first place, last, likewise, next, then.

Conclusion Paragraph:

• Restate your thesis / main idea.
• Summarize your main points. (Tie up any loose ends.)
• Create an strongly worded “clincher” sentence to end your conclusion.
• Never introduce new information in the conclusion.

Works Cited:

• A Works Cited is mandatory. (2 references required).  Use  MyBib.com
• Include citation information from both articles.
• Next: Topic List >>
• Last Updated: Feb 6, 2024 9:35 AM
• URL: https://montytech.libguides.com/1920sGerry

ARTS & CULTURE

The history of the flapper, part 1: a call for freedom.

The young, fashionable women of the 1920s define the dress and style of their peers in their own words

Emily Spivack

In the age before the Roaring Twenties, women were still wearing floor-length dresses. Waists were cinched. Arms and legs were covered. Corsets were standard on a daily basis. Hair was long. The Gibson girl was the idealized image of beauty. And the Victorian attitudes toward dress and etiquette created a strict moral climate.

Then the 1920s hit and things changed rapidly. The 19th Amendment passed in 1920 giving women the right to vote. Women began attending college. The Equal Rights Amendment was proposed by Alice Paul in 1923. World War I was over and men wanted their jobs back. Women, though, who had joined the workforce while the men were at war, had tasted the possibility of life beyond homemaking and weren’t ready to relinquish their jobs. Prohibition was underway with the passing of the 18th Amendment in 1919 and speakeasies were plentiful if you knew where to look. Motion pictures got sound, color and talking sequences. The Charleston’s popularity contributed to a nationwide dance craze. Every day, more women got behind the wheels of cars. And prosperity abounded.

All these factors—freedoms experienced from working outside the home, a push for equal rights, greater mobility, technological innovation and disposable income—exposed people to new places, ideas and ways of living. Particularly for women, personal fulfillment and independence became priorities—a more modern, carefree spirit where anything seemed possible.

The embodiment of that 1920s free spirit was the flapper, who was viewed disdainfully by an older generation as wild, boisterous and disgraceful. While this older generation was clucking its tongue, the younger one was busy reinventing itself, and creating the flapper lifestyle we now know today.

It was an age when, in 1927, 10-year-old Mildred Unger danced the Charleston on the wing of an airplane  in the air . What drove that carefree recklessness? For the most authentic descriptions that not only define the flapper aesthetic, but also describe the lifestyle, we turn to flappers themselves.

In  A Flapper’s Appeal to Parents , which appeared in the December 6, 1922, issue of  Outlook Magazine , the writer and self-defined flapper Elllen Welles Page makes a plea to the older generation by describing not only how her outward appearance defines her flapperdom, but also the challenges that come with committing to a flapper lifestyle.

If one judge by appearances, I suppose I am a flapper. I am within the age limit. I wear bobbed hair, the badge of flapperhood. (And, oh, what a comfort it is!), I powder my nose. I wear fringed skirts and bright-colored sweaters, and scarfs, and waists with Peter Pan collars, and low-heeled “finale hopper” shoes. I adore to dance. I spend a large amount of time in automobiles. I attend hops, and proms, and ball-games, and crew races, and other affairs at men’s colleges. But none the less some of the most thoroughbred superflappers might blush to claim sistership or even remote relationship with such as I. I don’t use rouge, or lipstick, or pluck my eyebrows. I don’t smoke (I’ve tried it, and don’t like it), or drink, or tell “peppy stories.” I don’t pet. But then—there are many degrees of flapper. There is the semi-flapper; the flapper; the superflapper. Each of these three main general divisions has its degrees of variation. I might possibly be placed somewhere in the middle of the first class.

She concludes with:

I want to beg all you parents, and grandparents, and friends, and teachers, and preachers—you who constitute the “older generation”—to overlook our shortcomings, at least for the present, and to appreciate our virtues. I wonder if it ever occurred to any of you that it required brains to become and remain a successful flapper? Indeed it does! It requires an enormous amount of cleverness and energy to keep going at the proper pace. It requires self- knowledge and self-analysis. We must know our capabilities and limitations. We must be constantly on the alert. Attainment of flapperhood is a big and serious undertaking!

The July 1922 edition of  Flapper Magazine , whose tagline was “Not for old fogies,” contained “A Flappers’ Dictionary.” According to an uncredited author, “A Flapper is one with a jitney body and a limousine mind.”

And from the 1922 “Eulogy on the Flapper,” one of the most well-known flappers, Zelda Fitzgerald, paints this picture:

The Flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub-deb-ism, 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. Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim and most of all to heart. She had mostly masculine friends, but youth does not need friends—it needs only crowds.

While these descriptions provide a sense of the look and lifestyle of a flapper, they don’t address how we began using the term itself. The  etymology of the word , while varied, can be traced back to the 17th century. A few contenders for early usages of the term include:

• A young bird, or wild duck, that’s flapping its wings as it’s learning to fly. (Consider how dancing the Charleston is reminiscent of a bird flapping its wings.)
• A prostitute or immoral woman.
• A wild, flighty young woman.
• A woman who  refused  to fasten her galoshes and the unfastened buckles flapped as she walked.

While the origin story differs depending on where you look, cumulatively, they all contribute to our perceptions of this independent woman of the 1920s. In the posts that follow, we’ll turn our attention to how those parameters set forth by Ellen, Zelda and  Flapper Magazine  are reflected in women’s attire we now associate with the 1920s, from undergarments to makeup and hair.

Flappers smoking cigarettes in a train car

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Emily Spivack | | READ MORE

Emily Spivack creates and edits the sites Worn Stories and Sentimental Value. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Thesis Statements

What is a thesis statement.

Your thesis statement is one of the most important parts of your paper.  It expresses your main argument succinctly and explains why your argument is historically significant.  Think of your thesis as a promise you make to your reader about what your paper will argue.  Then, spend the rest of your paper–each body paragraph–fulfilling that promise.

Your thesis should be between one and three sentences long and is placed at the end of your introduction.  Just because the thesis comes towards the beginning of your paper does not mean you can write it first and then forget about it.  View your thesis as a work in progress while you write your paper.  Once you are satisfied with the overall argument your paper makes, go back to your thesis and see if it captures what you have argued.  If it does not, then revise it.  Crafting a good thesis is one of the most challenging parts of the writing process, so do not expect to perfect it on the first few tries.  Successful writers revise their thesis statements again and again.

A successful thesis statement:

• makes an historical argument
• takes a position that requires defending
• is historically specific
• is focused and precise
• answers the question, “so what?”

How to write a thesis statement:

Suppose you are taking an early American history class and your professor has distributed the following essay prompt:

“Historians have debated the American Revolution’s effect on women.  Some argue that the Revolution had a positive effect because it increased women’s authority in the family.  Others argue that it had a negative effect because it excluded women from politics.  Still others argue that the Revolution changed very little for women, as they remained ensconced in the home.  Write a paper in which you pose your own answer to the question of whether the American Revolution had a positive, negative, or limited effect on women.”

Using this prompt, we will look at both weak and strong thesis statements to see how successful thesis statements work.

While this thesis does take a position, it is problematic because it simply restates the prompt.  It needs to be more specific about how  the Revolution had a limited effect on women and  why it mattered that women remained in the home.

Revised Thesis:  The Revolution wrought little political change in the lives of women because they did not gain the right to vote or run for office.  Instead, women remained firmly in the home, just as they had before the war, making their day-to-day lives look much the same.

This revision is an improvement over the first attempt because it states what standards the writer is using to measure change (the right to vote and run for office) and it shows why women remaining in the home serves as evidence of limited change (because their day-to-day lives looked the same before and after the war).  However, it still relies too heavily on the information given in the prompt, simply saying that women remained in the home.  It needs to make an argument about some element of the war’s limited effect on women.  This thesis requires further revision.

Strong Thesis: While the Revolution presented women unprecedented opportunities to participate in protest movements and manage their family’s farms and businesses, it ultimately did not offer lasting political change, excluding women from the right to vote and serve in office.

Few would argue with the idea that war brings upheaval.  Your thesis needs to be debatable:  it needs to make a claim against which someone could argue.  Your job throughout the paper is to provide evidence in support of your own case.  Here is a revised version:

Strong Thesis: The Revolution caused particular upheaval in the lives of women.  With men away at war, women took on full responsibility for running households, farms, and businesses.  As a result of their increased involvement during the war, many women were reluctant to give up their new-found responsibilities after the fighting ended.

Sexism is a vague word that can mean different things in different times and places.  In order to answer the question and make a compelling argument, this thesis needs to explain exactly what  attitudes toward women were in early America, and  how those attitudes negatively affected women in the Revolutionary period.

Strong Thesis: The Revolution had a negative impact on women because of the belief that women lacked the rational faculties of men. In a nation that was to be guided by reasonable republican citizens, women were imagined to have no place in politics and were thus firmly relegated to the home.

This thesis addresses too large of a topic for an undergraduate paper.  The terms “social,” “political,” and “economic” are too broad and vague for the writer to analyze them thoroughly in a limited number of pages.  The thesis might focus on one of those concepts, or it might narrow the emphasis to some specific features of social, political, and economic change.

Strong Thesis: The Revolution paved the way for important political changes for women.  As “Republican Mothers,” women contributed to the polity by raising future citizens and nurturing virtuous husbands.  Consequently, women played a far more important role in the new nation’s politics than they had under British rule.

This thesis is off to a strong start, but it needs to go one step further by telling the reader why changes in these three areas mattered.  How did the lives of women improve because of developments in education, law, and economics?  What were women able to do with these advantages?  Obviously the rest of the paper will answer these questions, but the thesis statement needs to give some indication of why these particular changes mattered.

Strong Thesis: The Revolution had a positive impact on women because it ushered in improvements in female education, legal standing, and economic opportunity.  Progress in these three areas gave women the tools they needed to carve out lives beyond the home, laying the foundation for the cohesive feminist movement that would emerge in the mid-nineteenth century.

Thesis Checklist

When revising your thesis, check it against the following guidelines:

• Does my thesis make an historical argument?
• Does my thesis take a position that requires defending?
• Is my thesis historically specific?
• Is my thesis focused and precise?
• Does my thesis answer the question, “so what?”

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: February 12, 2024 | Original: March 6, 2018

Flappers of the 1920s were young women known for their energetic freedom, embracing a lifestyle viewed by many at the time as outrageous, immoral or downright dangerous. Now considered the first generation of independent American women, flappers pushed barriers to economic, political and sexual freedom for women.

Women’s Independence

Multiple factors—political, cultural and technological—led to the rise of the flappers.

During World War I , women entered the workforce in large numbers, receiving higher wages that many working women were not inclined to give up during peacetime.

In August 1920, women’s independence took another step forward with the passage of the 19th Amendment , giving women the right to vote. And in the early 1920s, Margaret Sanger made strides in providing contraception to women, sparking a wave of women’s rights to birth control .

The 1920s also brought about Prohibition , the result of the 18th Amendment ending legal alcohol sales. Combined with an explosion of popularity for jazz music and jazz clubs, the stage was set for speakeasies , which offered illegally produced and distributed alcohol.

Henry Ford ’s mass production of cars brought down automobile prices, allowing the younger generation far more mobility than in earlier eras. Many people, a number of them young women, drove these cars into cities, which experienced a population boom.

With all these pieces in place, an unprecedented social explosion for young women was all but inevitable.

What Is a Flapper?

No one knows how the word flapper entered American slang, but its usage first appeared just following World War I.

The classic image of a flapper is that of a stylish young party girl. Flappers smoked in public, drank alcohol, danced at jazz clubs and practiced sexual freedom that shocked the Victorian morality of their parents.

Flapper Dress

Flappers were famous—or infamous, depending on your viewpoint—for their rakish attire.

They donned fashionable flapper dresses of shorter, calf-revealing lengths and lower necklines, though not typically form-fitting: Straight and slim was the preferred silhouette.

Flappers wore high heel shoes and threw away their corsets in favor of bras and lingerie. They gleefully applied rouge, lipstick, mascara and other cosmetics, and favored shorter hairstyles like the bob.

Designers like Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli and Jean Patou ruled flapper fashion. Jean Patou’s invention of knit swimwear and women’s sportswear like tennis clothes inspired a freer, more relaxed silhouette, while the knitwear of Chanel and Schiaparelli brought no-nonsense lines to women’s clothing. Madeleine Vionnet’s bias-cut designs (made by cutting fabric against the grain) emphasized the shape of a woman’s body in a more natural way.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald found his place in American literary history with “The Great Gatsby” in 1925, but he had already garnered a reputation before that as a spokesperson for the Jazz Age .

The press at the time credited Fitzgerald as the creator of the flapper because of his debut novel , “ This Side of Paradise ,” though the book didn’t specifically mention flappers.

The credit stuck and Scott began to write about flapper culture in short stories for the Saturday Evening Post in 1920, opening up the Jazz Age lifestyle to middle-class homes.

A collection of these stories was published that year under the title “Flappers and Philosophers,” cementing Fitzgerald as the flapper expert for the next decade.

Zelda Fitzgerald

If Fitzgerald was considered a chronicler of flappers, his wife Zelda Fitzgerald was considered the quintessential example of one.

A native of Montgomery, Alabama , Zelda was a stylish, free-spirited young woman who met Fitzgerald in 1918 while he was stationed there in the military. She was 17 at the time and—as the daughter of a prominent local judge—her hedonistic escapades scandalized her family.

The pair was married in New York City one month after “This Side of Paradise” was released and soon embarked on a lifestyle of reckless partying and publicity-seeking in Europe and across America.

Both publicly claimed that Zelda was Fitzgerald’s inspiration for all his female characters, bringing her in as much demand for her insight as he was. She was soon writing articles about the “modern” flapper lifestyle.

Lois Long was another writer chronicling flapper culture in print. Using the pseudonym Lipstick, Long began writing for The New Yorker shortly after its inception.

Her work chronicled the life of a flapper and recounted her real-life adventures of drinking and dancing all night long. She typically wrote her column—first named “When Nights Are Bold” and “Tables For Two,” launched in 1925—directly after her nights out, typing into the wee hours.

Flappers in Advertising

Recognizing that women now had disposable incomes of their own, advertising courted their interests beyond household items. Soap, perfume, cosmetics, cigarettes and fashion accessories were all the subjects of ads targeting women.

Helen Lansdowne Resor was the most powerful woman in advertising at the time. The head of women’s advertising at the J. Walter Thompson Agency, she worked her way up from secretary thanks to her keen understanding of selling to women. She was the first advertising executive to push sex appeal as a method of marketing to women, often focused on getting male attention.

Flapper style regularly graced the covers of magazines like Vanity Fair and Life , drawn by artists like John Held and Gordon Conway.

Flappers on Film

Anita Loos’ book “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and its follow-up “But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes” were famous satires of the world of flappers. The books focused on flapper Lorelei Lee and her male conquests. The first film version of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” was released in 1928 (another version was released in 1953, starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell ).

The popularity of movies exploded during the 1920s, though the screen versions of flappers were typically less permissive than the real-world versions. The first popular flapper movie was “Flaming Youth,” released in 1923 and starring Colleen Moore, who was soon Hollywood’s “go-to” actress for playing flappers onscreen.

Louise Brooks auditioned for a part in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” but failed. Nonetheless, the image of Brooks and her precise bob has become the archetypal vision of a flapper. The Hollywood portion of her film career featured several starring flapper roles before she moved on to more serious dramas.

The ‘It’ Girl

Clara Bow ’s nickname was “the It Girl,” referring to her 1927 film “It,” which was adapted from a magazine article by Elinor Glyn. Bow was the most successful screen flapper, beloved for the unpretentious manner of her portrayals and her frank sex appeal.

Anna May Wong broke barriers as the first Chinese-American movie star. Her image as a flapper off-screen was encouraged by movie studios to increase her appeal beyond the exotic roles in which they cast her.

Dancing was a crucial part of flapper culture. The Charleston and the Black Bottom were popular and considered more suggestive than any moves that had come before. The acclaimed 1923 British play “The Dancers,” which starred Tallulah Bankhead , examined the dance obsessions of two flappers.

Criticism of Flappers

Not everyone was a fan of women’s newfound sexual freedom and consumer ethos, and there was inevitably a public reaction against flappers.

Utah attempted to pass legislation on the length of women’s skirts. Virginia tried to ban any dress that revealed too much of a woman’s throat and Ohio tried to ban form-fitting outfits.

Women who populated beaches in bathing suits that were deemed inappropriate were escorted off the beach by police or arrested if they refused.

Popular Washington , D.C., hostess Mrs. John B. Henderson attempted to start a mass movement against what she considered vulgar fashions, appealing to prominent women’s clubs and colleges for help.

Clergymen like Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and Baptist pastor Dr. John Roach Straton became known for their tirades against young women’s fashions.

Flappers also received criticism from women’s rights activists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Lillian Symes, who felt flappers had gone too far in their embrace of licentiousness.

End of the Flappers

The age of the flapper came tumbling down suddenly on October 29, 1929, with the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression . No one could afford the lifestyle any longer, and the new era of frugality made the freewheeling hedonism of the Roaring Twenties seem wildly out of touch with grim new economic realities.

Many film-star flappers had already met their end two years earlier with the advent of talking film, which was not always kind to them. The Hays Code in 1930, which severely limited sexual themes in movies, made independent women in the flapper mold almost impossible to portray onscreen.

Flapper. Joshua Zeitz . Flappers: A Guide To An American Subculture. Kelly Boyer Sagert . Flappers and the New American Woman. Catherine Gourley . A Perfect Fit: Clothes, Character, and the Promise of America. Jenna Weissman Joselit .

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Home > GRADSCHOOL > GRADSCHOOL_DISSERTATIONS > 176

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Jazz and the cultural transformation of america in the 1920s.

etd-1110103-161818

Courtney Patterson Carney , Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Document Type

Dissertation

In the early twentieth century jazz was a regionally based, racially defined dance music that featured solo and collective improvisation. Originating in New Orleans, jazz soon spread throughout the country as musicians left the South for better opportunities-both economic and social-elsewhere in the country. Jazz greatly increased in popularity during the 1920s. No longer a regional music dominated by African Americans, jazz in the 1920s helped define a generation torn between the Victorian society of nineteenth century America and the culture of modernity that was quickly defining the early twentieth century. Jazz and its eventual popularity represented the cultural tensions present in modern America, and the acceptance of jazz reflected the degree to which Americans rejected or accepted traditional values. This dissertation examines the historical context of this larger transformation America underwent in the 1920s and early 1930s. In general, the narrative outlines the origins of jazz in the late 19th century, its dissemination through various means after World War I, and its eventual acceptance as a uniquely American cultural expression in the last part of the 1920s. Jazz music helped define the chaotic urban culture of America in the 1920s, and cities like Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles nurtured and shaped the music of the period. These three cities-each with dynamic black communities-supported diverse jazz scenes as well as served as the center of a particular type of mass communication technology. Together, the rapid developments in recording technology, the growing popularity of radio, and the burgeoning film industry transformed jazz from a local, predominately African American music, to a nationally accepted cultural form identified as uniquely American. The transformation of American culture in the 1920s forced people into a new set of relationships-social, regional, and political-and the cultural ambivalence generated by this change framed much of the debate surrounding the popularity of jazz music. By viewing mass culture and popular taste through the lens of jazz, this study attempts a more complete view of American culture in the 1920s.

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Recommended Citation

Carney, Courtney Patterson, "Jazz and the cultural transformation of America in the 1920s" (2003). LSU Doctoral Dissertations . 176. https://repository.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/176

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Charles J. Shindo

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Change in the 1920s in the United States Essay

The 1920s known as the Post-War Era or the ‘Roaring 20s’ was a period of great turbulent social change in the United States. Due to social and political movements as well as natural transitions pushed by ongoing events and technology, society was being reformed almost fluidly, pushing boundaries. By all indicators, change had the greater effect on the 1920s, driven by the challenge to authority, shifting social orders, and reexamination of gender politics that pushed U.S. identity farther from its traditionalist roots than any other time in the previous history.

Fundamentalists represented an extreme version of the traditionalist approach in religion and society. Stemming from the Fundamentalist branch of Protestantism which was undergoing a split on part with society at the time, these groups and individuals sought to preserve the status quo, often through violence and restriction. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) emerged at the time, enforcing ‘law and order’ and associated moral values of anti-immigration, anti-African Americans, and others. They intimidated, passed oppressive legislation, and created programs such as the Prohibition through the 18 th Amendment. However, society resisted the fundamentalist revival. The KKK, despite its oppression, could not shift the rapidly increasing immigration into the country as well as the internal migration of African Americans into cities.

Meanwhile, Prohibition was resisted via speakeasies and virtual lack of enforcement in many areas. Even among the fundamentalists, the measure was unpopular as quoted by the famous Protestant preacher Billy Sunday, “I don’t give a hoot for the regulation of the sale of liquor. If we must have booze, well let’s sell it in a saloon where it belongs” (Sunday). The resistance to authority under these circumstances, even if it was criminal, became symbolic for the era ushering a new change of liberalism.

The shift in social orders and gender politics, which are highly interrelated, were factors that made a tremendous impact on society at the time and instigated modernist perspectives and influences that were relevant in social movements throughout the 20th century.

Both power and politics, particularly in large cities, have been dominated by white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant elite. However, the 1920’s brought with it significant changes in social demographics, with immigration from abroad, African Americans moving to Northern cities, and even minority religions at the time such as Catholics and Judaism pushing for a greater place in American life. An analysis of the Great Migration at the time noted that fundamentalists believed that the movement was to challenge organized labor and promote Republican control in the North, but rather it was a response to the inequality and injustices occurring in the South (Woodson).

These racial, ethnic, and religious minorities were successful as with rapidly increasing urbanization, there were major demographic changes. The economy shifted towards an industrial model, but this also impacted lifestyles, personal behaviors and choices, and the general diversity of races and beliefs. Eventually, it also led to proportionate representation in positions of power, once again challenging the Fundamentalist grip on power and the rise of a more liberal agenda.

During WWI, women saw a significant rise in responsibility, and many entered the workforce. It was a period of time when women experienced a rise of visibility and increased rights, including the right to vote with the 19 th Amendment. Job opportunities and higher education were expanded for women, which began to become evident in culture where women would dress stylishly and have a freer approach to sexuality. In the words of Carrie Chapman Catt, the president of the NAWSA, “One common cause of female insurrection is

the primary. It interferes with the divine right of bosses, and they do not like it” (Catt). This strongly challenged the fundamentalist perspective, which saw women as housewives and caretakers of the home, not active participants of society, politics, and decision-makers. However, the social shifts of femininity and suffrage, which came to fruition after decades of struggle, ultimately modernized society to the extent that it would never return to the old ways of fundamentalist beliefs.

Works Cited

Catt, Carrie C. Carrie Chapman Catt Papers: Speech and Article File, 1892-1946; Articles; “What Women Have Done with the Vote,” The Independent, 1924 . Library of Congress, 1924. Web.

Sunday, Billy. “Not Rum but Righteousness”: Billy Sunday Attacks Booze . History Matters, 1920. Web.

Woodson, Carter G. A Century of Negro Migration . Digital Public Library of America, 1918. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2022, July 27). Change in the 1920s in the United States. https://ivypanda.com/essays/change-in-the-1920s-in-the-united-states/

"Change in the 1920s in the United States." IvyPanda , 27 July 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/change-in-the-1920s-in-the-united-states/.

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IvyPanda . 2022. "Change in the 1920s in the United States." July 27, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/change-in-the-1920s-in-the-united-states/.

1. IvyPanda . "Change in the 1920s in the United States." July 27, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/change-in-the-1920s-in-the-united-states/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Change in the 1920s in the United States." July 27, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/change-in-the-1920s-in-the-united-states/.

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