In this segment I'm going to be talking more about the cultural side
of the Jazz Age.
We've talked about the politics of the 1920s and the Republican
party,
talked a bit about the the kind of
affluent - at least surface affluent - economy
of the 1920s, but in this segment in particular I'd like to start
exploring the cultural side
of the so-called Jazz Age the 1920s. And I'd like to do so
with an inherent
argument at work. Now remember for politics and argued
that you have activism, but it's activism
of a certain kind, with reservation, activism designed to
preserve a certain normalcy, or status quo.
In a way that reeks of a progressive idea.
In terms of culture let me suggest that you had
at least two forces at work flowing out
of the war, the First World War. On the one hand,
you had a sort of cultural of liberation.
You can almost see it as a culture of nihilism, in other words
the very horrors of the war, because they had been so horrible, because
an entire generation a young men had been virtually wiped out in the trenches
of Europe,
you can also see as justification for saying
almost in a hedonistic way I suppose that
you know live, "eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may die." In other words,
death is on the doorstep,
let it all go, let it all hang out, to use a earlier phrase,
and do what makes you happy.
And there's a certain kind of liberation
in the horrors of war in that sense.
Not to make light of war at all, that's not what I'm doing,
but to suggest that for many of the writers, many of the cultural leaders of
the 1920s, especially among
that era's youth, there was perhaps that sense of foreboding that they never
fully escaped,
having experienced or
at least from a distance witnessed the effects of
a war on Europe. There were some other
factors at work here. One of them, of course, is what happens
with women during the war, women in particular.
remember that women have for a long while lived within -
especially middle-class women I should clarify that - have lived within
just sort of notion of womanhood that connects
the female within a marriage say or within society
always to a male. The
female is limited, is restricted to a role of domesticity
in the home so that it's not appropriate for a middle-class woman necessarily go
out and seek work.
Certainly a married woman, that's the role of the husband, to go into the
public sphere.
This role of domesticity instead links
the female, links the woman with child-rearing in particular
and with procreation. Now the idea of course is -
the idea behind this argument is -it's one of preserving the
purity of womanhood. It's bound up with things like fashion and
other ways of constructing culturally
the feminine. One of the examples I often use in class is the example if
the Gibson Girl.
Even for young women in training, women who were
a supposed to grow up to become become wives and mothers
in that older traditional sense,
long skirts, for instance, long hair that's not to be cut.
One of my favorite stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald has got to be "Bernice Bobs
Her Hair."
The idea of cutting a woman's hair or a woman cutting her own hair
is just unthinkable because tied or
bound with domesticity, bound with womanhood
is long hair.
What I'm gonna suggest here is the ways in which World War I
and the opportunities that become available to women
I think allow women to call the
cultural definitions, the identity with with
which they live, call that identity into question.
If you remember during the war, women will find work in
areas of the economy where they hadn't. worked before. So for instance
they're going to be working in offices, they'll be working in factories.
Of course a lot of women, lower-class women had worked in factories,
their mothers had worked in factories forever, for generations.
But the types of factories where these women work will be expanded,
in other words munitions, in heavier manufacturing.
But then, remember women have moved into the office:
clerks, secretaries, and in positions of authority:
police, fire, mail delivery things of that nature.
Well in the 1920s you can argue that women
who had been doing more during the war,
well at least some women will persist in these jobs.
They'll move more and more women working into the American mainstream of
unacceptable behavior.
And they'll do so working in fashion,
they'll work in the publishing industry, women will work in cosmetics and become
really important players in cosmetics, as well
as in education and in nursing in particular.
They will also -and I think this is worth consideration- these women who are making
money,
who are working, but also women in the domestic sphere, in the
improve middle-class sphere
will get more control
over household consumption. Notice that many of the
products I talked about earlier in terms of appliances for
instance are intended for the household and for household use.
But women will become the
focus of advertisement for things like automobiles
as well. There's a really great Ford Motor advertisement
enticing a woman, a new independent woman, to purchase an automobile
because an automobile means
independence for the new woman.
See that tie between gender and independence
and this new technology, culture and technology hand in hand.
We also, however, can talk about sexuality
and specifically a new
interest in the 1920s in various forms of birth control.
For however long you want to go back
of course the issue of abortion,
of ending an unwanted pregnancy, had been one of the possible routes for birth
control
open to women but
in the 1920s and we had seen it even a little bit prior especially
related to the work of Margaret Sanger,
someone you might wanna read more about.
Sanger, almost in a progressive sense, had seen the
impact of unwanted births on the poor, on lower-class women and lower-class families,
and rather than abortion necessarily had sought to
induce women
especially lower-class women to consider
the options that birth control might offer.
Now the interesting thing here is that birth control implies
the female, the woman, the wife, the mother,
taking control -as much as was possible
at the time- taking control over this process of procreation
even within a marriage. And that could be a real bone of contention, so to speak, a
real point of tension in a marriage,
if the male felt threatened by this.
And yet what this effort,
this push, and this acceptance birth control that we see
reflects is a new conception of sex and marriage that moves beyond procreation,
certainly something I think we see more and more in society
even today. And that's gonna be
I think most apparent with
the young, with youth you'll see it with the married
women, with mothers but with
the youth of the 1920s the so-called Lost Generation, the
youth of the Jazz Age.
In combination with the other indicators, the cultural symbols
that put them in the Jazz Age, there will be that
underlying new sexuality
and a new attitude toward sex.
With that I'm going to end this segment and we'll pick up again
with the Jazz Age and the tensions
of the era. Thanks.