Freedman, The New Woman

The New Woman: Changing Views of Women in the 1920s
Author(s): Estelle B. Freedman

Source: The Journal of American History, Vol. 61, No. 2 (Sep., 1974), pp. 372-393
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Organization of American Historians
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1903954
Accessed: 15-09-2016 13:13 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Organization of American Historians, Oxford University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to
digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of American History
This content downloaded from 193.6.131.114 on Thu, 15 Sep 2016 13:13:23 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
The New Woman:
Changing Views of Women in the 1920s
ESTELLE B. FREEDMAN
IN his suggestive article, "What Happened to the Progressive Movemen

in the 1920's," Arthur S. Link analyzed the legacy of the pre-World
War I "progressive coalition" of businessmen, farm groups, labor unions,
and "advocates of social justice."' However, he neglected to mention the fate
of feminists, either those women active in the suffrage movement or those
involved in broader areas of social reform. Despite Link's inattention to
women reformers, the question he posed about the progressive movement
in the 1920s should be asked of the women's movement as well. What
happened to feminism during the decade after the political goal of suffrage
had been achieved?
Failure to consider the women's movement in the 1920s is not an un-
common oversight among historians. Even students of women's history,
including Eleanor Flexner, Andrew Sinclair, and Aileen Kraditor, con-
clude their accounts with the passage of the nineteenth amendment.2 Unti
recently, this tendency to ignore post-1920 women's history has fostered
the repetition of a standard image of American women in the 1920s.
Frederick Lewis Allen's account is representative:
The revolution [in manners and morals] was accelerated . . . by the growing
independence of the American woman. She won the suffrage in 1920. She
seemed, it is true, to be very little interested in it once she had it; she voted, but
Estelle B. Freedman is an instructor of history in Princeton University.

1 Arthur S. Link, "What Happened to the Progressive Movement in the 1920's?" Ameri-
can Historical Review, LXIV (July 1959), 833-51.
2Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the Unit
States (Cambridge, Mass., 1959); Andrew Sinclair, The Better Half: The Emancipation of
the American Woman (New York, 1965); Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman
Suffrage Movement, 1890-1920 (New York, 1965). See also Page Smith, Daughters of
the Promised Land: Women in American History: Being an examination of the strange
history of the female sex from the beginning to the present with special attention to the
women of America, illustrated by curious anecdotes and quotations by divers authors, ancient
and modern (Boston, 1970); and Ishbel Ross, Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve (New
York, 1969).
372
New Woman 373
mostly as the unregenerate men about her did.... Few of the younger women
could rouse themselves to even a passing interest in politics: to them it was a
sordid and futile business, without flavor and without hope. Nevertheless, the
winning of the suffrage had its effect. It consolidated woman's position as man's
equal.3
William E. Leuchtenburg reached a similar conclusion nearly three decades

later:
The new woman wanted the same freedom of movement that men had and the
same economic and political rights. By the end of the 1920's she had come a long
way. Before the war, a lady did not set foot in a saloon; after the war, she entered
a speakeasy as thoughtlessly as she would go into a railroad station.... In the
business and political worlds, women competed with men; in marriage, they
moved toward a contractual role.... Sexual independence was merely the most
sensational aspect of the generally altered status of women.4
These and other accounts have attributed several characteristics to the

"New Women" of the 1920s: they failed to vote as a block or in greater
numbers than did men; their manners and morals differed sharply from
those of previous generations; and their legal and economic position had
so improved that for the first time in history women had become the social
and economic equals of men.
An examination of the record, however, reveals that historians have re-
peated these descriptions not because research and analysis have confirmed
their validity, but because no new questions have been asked about women
in the 1920s since the initial impressionistic observations were made. The
fact that these interpretations have been handed down for forty years with
very little modification makes them suspect, and closer analysis confirms
that several important historical questions have remained unanswered. Who
precisely was the new woman; what was her fate after 1920; and how does
her history relate to that of the women's movement? Specifically, historians
need to clarify when and why the organized women's movement lost its
influence; whether enfranchisement affected women's efforts for social
reform and for equal rights for their sex; precisely what economic gains
women made; and how widely and deeply the moral revolution extended.
Original and creative use of primary resources is necessary to answer
these questions. But before this research is undertaken, it is essential to
understand what has already been written about women in the 1920s. This
essay seeks to provide such a historiographical framework by tracing inter-
'Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties

(New York, 1931), 95-96.
'William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity: 1914-32 (Chicago, 1958), 159.
374 The Journal of American History
pretations of the new woman from the

of historical events and the emphases
posed to broader feminist goals is of ce
significance is the shift of conceptual f
analysis of the 1920s to the current quasi-feminist approach.
For years, historians agreed with Mary Beard's claim that women have
been a positive "force in history." They praised the post-1920 woman as an
active participant in American politics and economic life, as if trying to
correct what Arthur Meier Schlesinger had termed "the pall of silence
which historians have allowed to rest" over women's "services and achieve-
ments."6 Women's history was merely an effort to include more women
and their successes in the history books. In later years, after social scientists
rediscovered the "woman question" in the 1950s, historians groped toward
a feminist view which holds that women have been unable to contribute
fully to American society-even after suffrage-because they have re-
mained the oppressed victims of history.7 If the latter view prevails, women's
history must become the study of a unique interest group, a study which re-
quires new forms of research and new conceptual models.
Since historians were relatively silent on the question of the new woman
during all but two periods-from approximately 1927 to 1933 and from
1964 to the present-broad accounts and textbooks must suffice as evidence
for a review of the literature. Toward the end of the long period of neglect,
scholars in other disciplines began to question the validity of the image of
the post-World War I woman in America. By the time that a revival of
interest in the subject had reached popular dimensions (coincident with
but not necessarily related to the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan's The
Feminine Mystique), historians too had begun to review their conceptions
of the new woman. Numerous revisionist interpretations can now be ex-
5Gerda Lerner, "Women's Rights and American Feminism," American Scholar, 40

(Spring 1971), 235-48. Gerda Lerner's distinction between the women's rights movement
and the broader women's emancipation movement has been adopted in the following discus-
sion. She defines the former as a quest for political and legal equality and the latter as a
search for "freedom from oppressive restrictions imposed by sex; self-determination and
autonomy . . . financial and cultural independence, freedom to choose one's own life-style
regardless of sex." Ibid., 237.
6Arthur Meier Schlesinger, New Viewpoints in American History (New York, 1922),
126.
'Mary R. Beard, Woman as Force in History: A Study in Traditions and Realities (New
York, 1946). For a discussion of historiographical approaches to women's history and the
distinction between Beardian and feminist views, see Gerda Lerner, "New Approaches to
the Study of Women in American History," Journal of Social History, 3 (Fall 1969), 53-62.
Lerner rejects both approaches; she contends that women are too complex to be considered
as a single group, although she recognizes that they have been the victims of group dis-
crimination.
New Woman 375
pected; from what h

Social commentato
conclusions in their
centrating on politic
women's participat
that women had not
As might be expect
a 1927 Current His
kins Gilman found
economic achievem
wrote that the vote
the state level and
opponents of woma
"Woman's Encroach
Revolt Against the
in the early debate
tributed anything n
perience has proved
just as men have.'10
Positive but apolog
special issue of the
cial Science devoted
rector of the Leagu
than eight years to
that the contributi
vote. Another cont
fully stepped from
necessary to assure
domestic duties."
Journalists, too, c
favorable, their an
'Charlotte Perkins Gilm

tory, XXVII (Oct. 1927
Age-Old Movement," ib
(April 26, 1930), 11.
'Anthony M. Ludovici, "Woman's Encroachment on Man's Domain," Current H
XXVII (Oct. 1927), 21-25; Hugh L. McMenamin, "Evils of Woman's Revolt Against
the Old Standards," ibid., 30-32.
1 "Ten Years of Woman Suffrage," 11.
Marguerite M. Wells, "Some Effects of Woman Suffrage," Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science, CXLIII (May 1929), 209; Dorothy Ashby Mon-
cure, "Women in Political Life," Current History, XXIX (Jan. 1929), 639-43.
many of our editors seem enthusiastic over the showing made under the
Nineteenth Amendment," a Literary Digest survey found; "Yet on the
other hand, few are pessimistic." A representative editorial comment ap-
peared in the Winston-Salem Journzal:
The women have acquitted themselves well during this first ten years of their
political enfranchisement. But even greater results will be expected during the
next decade. During the ten years just passed the women have been laying a
foundation. The superstructure of achievement now remains to be built.'2
Social scientists whose early evaluations reported few substantive gains for
women were not without sympathy for the problems the new voters faced.
The authors of a statistical study of the 1920 election found that women
had not utilized the ballot to the same extent as men, nor had they voted
predictably; however, they suggested that women were politically handi-
capped-not by a psychological incapacity for politics, as some critics
claimed, but only by lack of experience. "When participating in politics has
become through habit as natural to women as to men . . . women will
undoubtedly participate in all phases of political life on a basis of actual as
well as nominal equality with men.' '13
Although most writers stressed political rights, a few surveyed women's
progress in finding new economic and social roles. Radical editor V. F.
Calverton believed that "woman's economic independence has been a far
more important item in her emancipation than [has} her political en-
franchisement." He was impressed by the increasing number of married
women who were working and by the effects of the growing women's
labor force in fortifying single women's desires for independence. How-
ever, Calverton duly noted the pervasive discrimination against women
workers, particularly that of organized labor against married women in
industry.'4
Other writers who explored the possibilities of social and cultural
emancipation of women in the 1920s found, like Calverton, that anti-
feminist attitudes persisted. George Britt wrote that "it is possible for the
Southern girl now to an extent never permitted before to . . . become a
person and not just another woman." But, after citing individual examples
of professional women in the South, the growth of women's clubs during
12 "Ten Years of Woman Suffrage," 11.

13Stuart A. Rice and Malcolm M. Willey, "American Women's Ineffective Use of the
Vote," Current-History, XX (July 1924), 641-47.
14 V. F. Calverton, "Careers for Women-A Survey of Results," ibid., XXIX
1929), 633-38; V. F. Calverton and Samuel D. Schmalhausen, eds., Woman's Coming of
Age: A Symposium (New York, 1931), xi-xx.
New Woman 377
the 1920s, changes in personal habits such as smoking, and the involve-
ment of women in social reform, Britt concluded: "The Southern girl may
like to earn a little money and have her fling, but the ideal in the back of
her head is a nice house in the home town and a decorative position in
society."15 Former Judge Ben Lindsey drew on his experiences counseling
youth in the 1920s to make ample references to signs of the moral revolu-
tion: premarital sex, birth control, drinking, contempt for older values.
Yet almost every case he cited revealed a strong conflict between the appeal
of flamboyant freedom and the sense of sin it still engendered. Beneath
it all Lindsey suspected that in a few years the lively flapper would be-
come "a happy, loyal wife with several children."'6
In spite of indications that only limited women's rights and not broader
feminist goals had been advanced, the optimistic writers of the 1920s
generally hailed the participation of women in American society and the
end of discrimination. Typical of their strained efforts was Chase Going
Woodhouse's overly enthusiastic tone, even as his evidence wore thin.
Women had made significant advances in education, Woodhouse wrote,
particularly "outstanding improvements in nursing education," but Harvard
still refused to train women for law and medicine; employment figures "in-
creased steadily," he claimed, although for the period after 1919 he had to
juggle figures to include housewives among the "gainfully employed";
women achieved professional advances, he noted, adding, however, that they
were mainly in teaching and mostly before 1920. Despite the fact that in
education, industry, and politics "despair and resentment" characterized
women's responses, Woodhouse claimed "steadily gained recognition" for
women.'7
Certainly women had made some advances by the end of the 1920s,
although few commentators explained how their economic and political
gains compared to previous decades or with the broader social and cultural
goals of feminists. In politics, women writers claimed significant progress,
while men graciously excused women's supposedly poor voting record, and
most writers ignored entirely women's legislative achievements of the early
1920s. A few writers recognized the limitations in women's roles, but most
strained to emphasize the positive, although often superficial, aspects of
women's history in the 1920s-slight increases in political officeholding
15 George Britt, "Women in the New South," Calverton and Schmalhausen, eds.,
Woman's Coming of Age, 409-23.
16 Ben B. Lindsey, "The Promise and Peril of the New Freedom," ibid., 447-71.
17 Chase Going Woodhouse, "The Status of Women," American Journal of Sociolo
XXXV (May 1930), 1091-96.
and nonprofessional jobs and greater sexual freedom. Nevertheless they

confidently portrayed the period as one in which feminist goals were well
on their way to fulfillment.18 By proclaiming emancipation a fail accompli
and denying the existence of discrimination, they only helped to discourage
further feminist efforts for deeper social change.
Meanwhile, historians began to incorporate the 1920s into their works,
and they too stressed positive roles and women's increased participation in
American life. Although published in the early 1930s, the first histories
reflected the tone of the years before the crash rather than the Depres-
sion. Charles and Mary Beard, Allen, and Preston William Slosson
echoed the feelings of the generation that had seen both the pre-suffrage
woman and the new woman, and their accounts emphasized the changes in
woman's social position during the 1920s.
"Women," wrote the Beards, "now assumed an unquestioned role in
shaping the production of goods, material, humanistic, literary, and artis-
tic." The ballot had enlarged women's influence in politics, while economic
power, education, and social freedom had made women "powerful arbiters in
all matters of taste, morals, and thinking." The Beards seemed pleased with
these successes, but they were also apprehensive about some of the conse-
quences of women's emancipation-the decline in the authority of fathers,
defiant and divorce-prone women, and the "more intransigent" demand for
"'absolute and unconditional equal opportunity' in every sphere" of an equal
rights amendment.'s
Slosson reported the "complete acceptance of American women in politi-
cal life" and even greater progress, if that was possible, in economic status
and social prestige. But Slosson's main concerns centered on areas tradi-
tionally defined as women's spheres. In a chapter entitled "The American
Woman Wins Equality," Slosson devoted six pages to economic and politi-
cal developments and twenty-two pages to the family, home, and fashions.
Shorter skirts, more comfortable undergarments, shorter hair, the use of
cosmetics, smoking, drinking, and the "breezy, slangy, informal" flapper
characterized the era for him. As suffrage "disappeared from politics,"
women became content, he wrote, with the exception of "the more doc-
trinaire type" who pressed for equal rights.20 Women's history was re-
verting to women's spheres of home, fashions, and sex and finding there
little or no oppression.
"S A similar confidence among social scientists in the 1920s has been described by Henry
F. May, "Shifting Perspectives on the 1920's," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XLIII
(Dec. 1956), 405-27.
" Charles A. and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization: The Indu
(New York, 1930), 753-58.
' Preston William Slosson, The Great Crusade and After: 1914-1928 (New York,
1930), 130-61.
New Woman 379
According to Allen, women did not vote in the 1920s, but they
did work, if not in offices or factories, then in the professional job of
homemaking. But the job, or the potential for earning, created a feelin
comparative economic independence in women, which, for Allen, threatened
husbandly and parental authority. Even with all of this, woman wanted
more: "She was ready for the revolution" -sexual freedom, as enhanced
by Sigmund Freud, the automobile, and Hollywood. Changes in fashion,
Allen implied, were signs of deeper changes in the American feminine
ideal.2'
With these three historical views, women in the 1920s began to be
presented as flappers, more concerned with clothing and sex than with
politics. Women had by choice, the accounts suggested, rejected political
emancipation and found sexual freedom. The term feminism nearly dis-
appeared from historical accounts, except in somewhat pejorative references
to the Woman's party. While critics claimed that women had achieved
equality with men, they issued subtle warnings of moral and family decay.
At the same time, women writing about the 1920s remained more con-
cerned about political and economic equality than about the flapper and
the moral revolution. In 1933, Inez Haynes Irwin offered Angels and
Amazons, an all too glowing chronicle of the advancement of women in
American history. Looking back over the first decade of new freedom,
Irwin found four organized feminist activities "worth remembering": work
for child welfare, self-education as voters, influence on world peace, and
the struggle for equal legal status for women.22 None of these subjects had
been discussed yet by historians, and Irwin left the moral revolution en-
tirely to them.
In the same year, Sophonisba Breckinridge offered a more sophisticated
approach to women's history in a monograph which Henry F. May has
called "a monument of the chastened social science of the thirties."23 En-
titled Women in the Twentieth Century, her volume was a statistical survey
accompanied by analytical comment on women's organizations, occupations,
and political life. It is an invaluable aid for the study of American women,
in sobering contrast to the superficial treatment of women in other works.
Breckinridge's conclusions suggested that perhaps women were not the
emancipated, satisfied participants in American society that historians were
describing. While an increasing number of women worked, she found that
21 Allen, Only Yesterday, 97-109.

' Inez Haynes Irwin, Angels and Amazons: A Hundred Years of American Women
(Garden City, 1933), 411.
23 Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, Women in the Twentieth Century: A Study of the Politi
Social and Economic Activities (New York, 1933); May, "Shifting Perspectives on the
1920's," 410.
they were severely restricted in their range of employment. In the realm of

public activity, Breckinridge reported that "the moment seems an unhappy
one at which to attempt to take account of stock." Women had become
disillusioned with the ballot and had turned to government agencies and edu-
cational institutions for bases of emancipation, but they had not as yet been
successful in obtaining political power. Breckinridge described women's
lobbying efforts and their roles in the national parties, but her picture is
nowhere as promising as either Irwin's account of public life or the
"progress" implied in Slosson's or Allen's descriptions of the flapper. The
Breckinridge study provided the data which might have prompted histori-
cal revisions on women's emancipation in the 1920s. On the contrary, with
one exception in the mid-1930s, her work seems to have been unconsulted
for several decades, and the new woman remained an assumption rather
than a subject for historical inquiry.
The one writer who did examine Breckinridge's work was Ernest R.
Groves, a sociologist of marriage and the family who stressed the economic
roots of feminist activity. Groves outlined the effects of industrial employ-
ment during World War I in raising women's expectations and in a
"heightening of the feelings of self-interest." Groves was aware that the
growth of a female labor force did not automatically change attitudes
toward working women and the family, and he suggested that the con-
tinued existence of a temporary female work force contributed to an ex-
ploitative double standard of wages geared to nonpermanent help. While
the vote had quickened the trend to legal equality and reinforced lobbying
activities, women were not yet, in Groves' view, active and equal subjects
in history. Later writers would agree with him that women were a special
class, treated unequally, the "feminine side of a masculine civilization."24
From the mid-1930s through the late 1940s feminism was not a popular
subject among historians, just as women's rights was not one of the raging
issues of the day. A country struggling through a prolonged depression saw
woman's emancipation and her entry into the job market in a very different
light than had an earlier, more prosperous society. Working women were
being asked, if not forced, to leave their newly acquired positions and re-
turn to the home, either to allow men to take up their jobs or at least to
24 Ernest R. Groves, The American Woman: The Feminine Side of a Masculine Civiliza-
tion (New York, 1937), 364, 377. Legislative victories included the Women's Bureau,
which became a permanent agency in 1920, and the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, which
funded welfare and hygiene centers for maternity and infancy care. Ernest R. Groves also
connected the sexual revolution with economic roots: because women's motives for marry-
ing had become less economic, he reasoned, women had begun to "demand from the experi-
ence a fulfillment of personality which more and more includes satisfactory sexual rela-
tionships." Ibid., 389.
New Woman 381
offer moral support to families in a time of crisis.25 When rearmament and

the war provided new jobs for women, American society had ample reason
to readjust to working women; but by no means had a consensus been
reached on the proper place of women in American society, for the postwar
years witnessed renewed debate over women's roles.
It is not surprising that during these crisis-ridden years, historians were
either silent or ambivalent about the emancipation of women. The only
sense one can get of their interpretations must come from textbooks and
broad surveys of American thought, most of which contained brief sec-
tions on the new woman.26 While no one seemed to doubt that emancipa-
tion had occurred, several historians were unsure whether to welcome or
denounce the new woman.
Historians often cited the relationship between urbanization and the
emancipation of women to explain economic opportunities in the 1920s:
a rising standard of living, more household appliances, and compulsory
public education provided women with unprecedented leisure time which
enabled them to join women's clubs or to enter the work force.27 These
developments in turn influenced family life, the texts claimed, as evidenced
by a declining birth rate and a climbing divorce rate. At this point histor-
ians often highlighted woman's new role of "professional homemaker."
For example, Dwight Lowell Dumond's 1937 college text explained that
feminists in the nineteenth century had made only small gains, but "Since
then household electrical appliances have done more to emancipate women
than all the generations of agitation by militant suffragettes." Consequently,
"women were living in a new and happier world. . . . The joy of home-
making replaced the drudgery of housekeeping...."28 Merle Curti's image
2" According to Robert and Helen Lynd, the need for women to work to supplement re-
duced family incomes during the Depression confused traditional roles and placed renewed
emphasis on femininity and on the value of women as homemakers. Robert S. Lynd and
Helen Merrel Lynd, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (New York,
1937), 102-43. E. Wight Bakke noted that although women worked during the Depression,
their employment was always considered a necessity, and their proper place remained in
the home. E. Wight Bakke, The Unemployed Worker: A Study of the Task of Making a
Living without a Job (London, 1940), 118.
26 Jeannette P. Nichols, Twentieth Century United States: A History (New York, 1943);
Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of the American Republic
(2 vols., New York, 1942); John D. Hicks, The American Nation: A History of the
United States from 1865 to the Present (Boston, 1949).
27 Harold Underwood Faulkner, American Political and Social History (New York, 1937),
651-52; Foster Rhea Dulles, Twentieth Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1945), 176-
77; Dwight Lowell Dumond, Roosevelt to Roosevelt: The United States in the Twentieth
Century (New York, 1937), 35; Merle Curti, Richard Shryock, Thomas Cochran, and Fred
Harvey Harrington, An American History (New York, 1950), 452-60; Louis M. Hacker
and Helene S. Zahler, The United States in the 20th Century (New York, 1952), 355-56.
28 Dumond, Roosevelt to Roosevelt, 3 5.
of women in the 1920s displayed ambivalance toward working women.

While he found that women's magazines devoted space to careers "in the
big world outside the home," he added that they "naturally" gave more
space to the efficient management of the home.29 Foster Rhea Dulles' one
page on the emancipation of women related increasing opportunity in busi-
ness and professions to divorce rates, as well as to the development of in-
dependent social lives for women.30 Harvey Wish discussed women's em-
ployment outside the home and then cited Robert and Helen Lynd's Mid-
dletown study to demonstrate the weaknesses in modern marriage-the loss
of companionship in marriage, the use of birth control, and the new man-
ners (smoking, drinking, and masculinized fashions) of women.3'
These authors may not have intended to link working women with family
decline, but often the proximity of the two statements, if not an explicitly
drawn connection, brought them together in the mind of the reader. Simi-
larly, historians in the 1930s and 1940s viewed the "moral revolution" in
more negative terms-as a threat to the family-than it had been seen in
the late 1920s, when the short skirt and bobbed hair were likely to be used
as symbols of emancipation.
Once again, historians disagreed about the political effects of enfranchise-
ment. Some believed that voting rights for women had little or no effect.'2
Others claimed that women had won total equality, as in John D. Hicks'
statement that even before 1920 "Legal discriminations against women,
aside from suffrage, were brought near the vanishing point.' 33 Similarly,
Henry Steele Commager wrote that while the emancipation of women had
begun in the 1890s with the typewriter, telephone exchange, and labor
saving devices, it was "dramatized by the vote, and guaranteed by birth
control.' '34 Dumond pointed to women's political roles in the Women's
Joint Congressional Committee and stated that "Their success in securing
29 Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought (New York, 1943), 700. Merle Curti
left the reader with the impression that women remained at home in the 1920s as efficient
homemakers, occasionally glancing up from the card table to take note of the world. But
during his discussion of the 1930s, Curti looked back on the decade as a time of "expanding
economic opportunities from which so many ambitious women had profited...." The
1930s, he claimed, "dealt blow after blow at women in the professions, in the arts, and in
business. Feminists regretted that the new turn of events undermined the progress women
had been making...." Ibid., 721. When this progress had been made is unclear.
3 Dulles, Twentieth Century America, 176.
31 Harvey Wish, Society and Thought in Modern America: A Social and Intellectual His-
tory of the American People from 1865 (New York, 1952), 445-47.
32 Hacker and Zahler, United States in the 20th Century, 356; Faulkner, American Political
and Social History, 651-52.
33 Hicks, American Nation, 408.
3 Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought
and Character Since the 1880's (New Haven, 1950), 46.
New Woman 383
state legislation for child welfare, women's legal rights, social hygiene and
education have been little less than phenomenal."35 A 1950 textbook by
Curti, Richard Shryock, Thomas Cochran, and Fred Harvey Harrington
also acknowledged women's fight for progressive legislation and local good
government in the 1920s, but contrary to Dumond claimed that women
rarely joined political parties.36
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, then, historians briefly portrayed post-
1920 women as emancipated by the vote and by an urbanized, industrialized
society, but choosing to remain for the most part in the home. Their por-
trayals of satisfied professional housewives or unstable career women were
doubtless both products of and reinforcements for the Depression psy-
chology which sought to bring women out of the work force. While legal
and political equality were praised, social and cultural emancipation evoked
gentle reproaches. In no sense, however, did historians acknowledge the
persistence of discrimination in all realms.
Post-World War II American society faced a dilemma of women's roles:
would the many women who had gone to work during the war return to
their homes? Popular literature on "woman's place" abounded after 1947,37
and scholars, too, began to question women's roles in a way that would
eventually change the direction of historical writing on the new woman.
Once the existing discrimination against women was exposed, historians
would have to reexamine their portrayal of the past decades as periods of
emancipation.
Evidence of a reemerging intellectual curiosity about women can be
found in the publications and reviews of the early 1950s. Alfred Kinsey's
report on Sexual Behavior in the Human Female raised dormant issues of
women s sexuality.38 More provoking, perhaps, was the 1953 English
translation of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, which produced new
hopes and fears of a revitalization of feminism.39 In the same year, Mirra
Dumond, Roosevelt to Roosevelt, 60. The Women's Joint Congressional Committee

worked for passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act (1921), the Cable Act (1922), which
guaranteed the right of independent citizenship for married women, and dozens of other
bills.
3" Curti, Shryock, Cochran, and Harrington, An American History, 462.
37 On the postwar confusion over women's roles, see William Chafe, "From Suffrage to
Liberation: The Changing Roles of American Women, 1920-1970" (doctoral dissertation,
Columbia University, 1971), especially chapter ten. William Chafe cites, for example,
Frances Levison, "American Woman's Dilemma," Life, 22 (June 16, 1947), 101-16.
s Alfred Kinsey and others, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia, 1953).
" Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York, 1953). The generally favorable re-
views ranged in opinion from "a very lively thesis" (New York Times, Feb. 22, 1953) to
". . . borders on the paranoid" (Charles J. Rollo, "Reader's Choice," Atlantic, 191 [April
1953), 86). Two reviewers predicted that the book would dispel myths about women and
encourage reform. Patrick Mullahy, "Woman's Place," Nation, 176 (Feb. 21, 1953), 171-
Komarovsky defended equal education for women, and another sociologist,
Sidney Ditzion, published Marriage, Morals, and Sex in America. A His-
tory of Ideas. If these offerings were not sufficient to bring women to the
attention of the intellectual community, the very title of Ashley Montagu's
essay, The Natural Superiority of Women, must have raised a few eye-
brows (though probably not much consciousness) .40
These precursors of the new feminism appeared in the 1950s for several
reasons. American women were ready for a revival of feminism. They had
weathered the years of the Depression and war without making new demands
for equality. They now lived in an increasingly affluent society which was
beginning to turn its attention to the question of racial equality, a subject
which has historically heightened feminist concerns. Furthermore, the
generation of women which came to maturity in the 1950s had not lived
through and tired of an earlier feminist movement. These women were at
a crossroads; would they return to the long interrupted battle for equality,
or would they be seduced by the security promised to homemakers?
Scholars looked back to the 1920s for clues, and although they considered
women's political life, they placed more emphasis on social and cultural
forces and explored the social roles open to women.
In 1950, for example, sociologists Arnold W. Green and Eleanor Mel-
nick asked "What Has Happened to the Feminist Movement?" They
found that feminism had achieved specific goals of suffrage and job op
tunity, as well as contributing to broader change by giving impetus to "th
steady nurturing of the philosophy of the service state." But the feminist
movement, they believed, had in a larger sense failed, for "about thirty
years ago, in both politics and the job world, a fairly stable level was
reached which the further passage of time has only indeterminately altered."
Three factors hampered women's efforts for further advancement: the
"residue of prejudice against working women," especially in non-tradi-
tional women's occupations; feminists' ignorance "of the fundamental
changes in social structure which must precede women's assuming position
of leadership . . ."; and class cleavages in the women's movement as ex-
acerbated by the conflict over the equal rights amendment (the National
72; and Ashley Montagu, New York Herald Tribune, Feb. 22, 1953. Elizabeth Hardwick
bitterly criticized the book as one which filled her "with a kind of shame and sadness."
Elizabeth Hardwick, "The Subjection of Women," Patisan Review, 20 (May 1953), 321-
31. Joint reviews on women's literature included S. Rudikoff, Hudson Review, IX (Summer
1956); and Robert Bierstadt, "The Women Books," Antioch Review, XIV (June 1954).
40 Mirra Komarovsky, Women in the Modern World: Their Education and their
Dilemmas (Boston, 1953); Sidney Ditzion, Marriage, Morals, and Sex in America. A His-
tory of Ideas (New York, 1953); Ashley Montagu, The Natural Superiority of Women
(New York, 1953).
New Woman 385
Woman's party of upper-class and professional women supported the

amendment, while proletarian and middle-class women wanted protective
legislation) .4
The view that women had not yet achieved full equality and that social
prejudices were at least partially responsible found even fuller expression
in 1951 in a pivotal article by sociologist Helen Mayer Hacker. Elaborating
on Gunnar Myrdal's comparison of woman's social position with that of
Negroes, Hacker viewed women as a minority group that suffered collec-
tive discrimination, received separate socialization, and generally fit so-
ciological definitions of minority group status and behavior.42 Of particular
interest to historians was Hacker's conceptualization of a "sex relations
cycle," comparable to the race relations cycle hypothesized by Robert Park.
She believed that the latter stages of the cycle of competition, conflict, ac-
commodation, and assimilation had been reached with the passage of the
suffrage amendment, and she suggested prophetically that a new era of
women's dissatisfaction was approaching.
The analogy of women with minority groups later appeared elsewhere,
including Ditzion's Marriage, Morals, and Sex and in a reinterpretation of
the flapper by B. June West. Rejecting the traditional view that women's
fads and fashions in the 1920s were manifestations of freedom, West's
literary analysis suggested that women's fashions were an apeing of men,
"as minority groups have always done ... to the so-called superior group."
Although the plays and novels of the 1920s depicted women in a variety
of masculinized roles-the aggressor in sex, the divorcee-West cautioned
that the literature "implied a moral disintegration that was quite likely
more publicized than actually existent.'43
Another reinterpretation of changes in women's roles in the 1920s which
questioned historians' assertions of sex equality was Women and Work in
America by Robert W. Smuts. The legal status of women, he found,
shifted not after World War I but earlier with the passing of the frontier,
and by the end of the war the feminist movement was "rapidly subsiding."
The war had led to a "remarkable liberalization of views about women's
abilities and the propriety of their working outside the home," but the
postwar decades were marked by women's lack of interest in many of the vic-
41 Arnold W. Green and Eleanor Melnick, "What Has Happened to the Feminist Move-
ment?" Alvin W. Gouldner, ed., Studies in Leadership. Leadership and Democratic Action
(New York, 1950), 83, 296, 301.
42Helen Mayer Hacker, "Women as a Minority Group," Social Forces, 30 (Oct. 1951),
60-69. The definitions she used are those of Louis Wirth and Kurt Lewin.
43B. June West, "The 'New Woman,'" Twentieth Century Literature, I (July 1955),
5 5-68.
tories they had won. As evidence Smuts described a low level of interest in
politics, a small increase in women working for pay, retirement from work
at marriage, indifference of young women to feminism, and a failure to
make significant gains in careers other than teaching and nursing. His
explanation for this demise of feminism in the 1920s was that feminists,
never more than a small minority of women to begin with, had won their
primary goals; their demands became less important as the status of men
and women became less differentiated. Thus the women's rights movement
had failed only in succeeding too well, and women turned from a search
for political and economic equality to one for sexual and social identity."4
How did historians respond to the postwar interest in the social
roles of women? A few studies appeared, some inspired by the centennial
of the Seneca Falls Convention, some worthless, such as Eric J. Dingwall's
survey of women in American history, and some very suggestive, such as
Carl N. Degler's article on Gilman.45 For the most part, however, historians
maintained the older views that women had lost interest in politics after
attaining legal equality. Historians' interests in social emancipation re-
mained confined to the "revolution in morals" concept.
Eric Goldman's 1952 history of reform, Rendezvous with Destiny, stated
little more than that women's suffrage had made no difference, women
failed to use the ballot, and when they did vote they did not vote as
women.46 Link's 1955 text repeated the story of the revolution in manners
and morals, claimed that women had achieved political and economic
equality after 1920, and seemed relieved to announce that the "revolution
in morals and customs had run its full course by 1930 [when] . .. . t]here
seemed to be certain signs of returning sanity."47 Leuchtenburg argued
that "women's suffrage had few consequences, good or evil"; although
millions voted and some held office, "the new electorate caused scarcely a
ripple in American political life." Yet in business and social life, Leuchten-
burg described a period of accomplishment.48
These accounts are not necessarily mistaken, but they are glaringly in-
consistent in their evaluations of the progress toward women's emancipa-
tion that was made in the 1920s. What is most interesting is that histo-
'Robert W. Smuts, Women and Work in America (New York, 1959), 142-43.
4 Eric John Dingwall, The American Woman: An Historical Study (New York, 1956);
Carl N. Degler, "Charlotte Perkins Gilman on the Theory and Practice of Feminism,"
American Quarterly, VIII (Spring 1956), 21-39.
4 Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform
(New York, 1952), 292-93.
4 Arthur S. Link, American Epoch: A History of the United States since the 1890's (New
York, 1955), 274-75.
48 Leuchtenburg, Perils of Prosperity, 160.
New Woman 387
rians had not yet defined and attempted to resolve the controversies over
the women's movement and the history of women after suffrage. Previous
writers had claimed all things and nothing for women in the 1920s: that
the vote was not used, that it had brought equality; that women became
men's equals in the world of work, that they had remained in traditionally
feminine occupations; that the sexual revolution had changed women's
lives, that the revolution was more a literary than an actual occurrence.
Either historians were indifferent to these issues in the early postwar years,
or, perhaps, while other scholars pointed to new conceptual frameworks
for viewing women's history, historians were contemplating the issues and
beginning to design the research which was to take form in the next decade.
If the latter was the case, it was a long time before their thoughts actually
reached the public, for one must skip to the early 1960s to find them in
print. By this time, concern about discrimination against minority groups
was widespread; President John F. Kennedy had established a Commis-
sion on the Status of Women and several states and localities had followed
suit; civil rights legislation was being applied to women's rights; the Negro
rights movement was about to turn toward black power; and, in 1963,
Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, a journalistic polemic which
was to sell over a million copies and help spark a revival of feminism in
America.49
As if to mark the beginning of serious interest in women in American
history, two established historians published essays on the subject in 1964.
9Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York, 1963). Although Betty Friedan's
book is not a historical study, it does offer several hypotheses on the history of women after
1920 which require clarification. Friedan dated the end of the era of the new woman-the
woman who searches for her own identity-around 1950, when a change in emphasis to
"femininity" created the feminine mystique of housewife-mother. Her argument is based
in large part on analyses of short stories in women's magazines, in which she finds career
girl heroines predominant in the 1930s and housewife-mother heroines, who forsake careers
for husband, home, and family, characteristic of the 1950s. One explanation for the shift,
Friedan asserted, was that career women editors of these magazines were either being
replaced by men or were so embarrassed by their own success that they tried to make other
women accept a more traditional feminine role. "Did women really go home again as a
reaction to feminism?" she asked; "The fact is that to women born after 1920 [and thus
coming to maturity in the post-World War II period] feminism was dead history. It ended
as a vital movement in America with the winning of that final right: the vote." Ibid., 93.
After 1945, the sexual sell of advertising further encouraged the role of homemaker-con-
sumer. Ibid., 200-05. Friedan's argument overlooked the realities of women's history. She
hypothesized a generation of liberated career women in the 1920s and 1930s, largely based
on one short story published in 1939. She offered some basis for the 1950s model from
the magazine literature but had no reason to suggest that the homemaker-consumer had not
originated in the 1920s. After World War II, she admitted, statistics on working women
show increased female employment. For another use of the women's magazine literature,
see Chafe, "From Suffrage to Liberation," 190-201, which finds domesticity and an attack
on feminism in the 1930s, if not earlier.
Both works indicated a significant shift away from the view that women's
emancipation had been completed in the 1920s and toward one that recog-
nized the persistence of discrimination against women.
David Potter's comments on "American Women and the American
Character" credited the city, the business office, and mechanization with
promotion of sexual equality but noted the barriers to full equality remai
ing, notably the dualism of career and domestic roles which made emanci-
pation of women different from that of other oppressed groups.50 Degler
also traced feminism to industrialization and urbanization. At first, Degler
agreed with earlier commentators about the advances women had made.
However, he retreated from unqualified congratulations by noting that no
permanent increase in the female labor force was made after World War I,
that women's occupational gains were not great in the professions, that
sexual divisions of labor remained, and that women's educational position
later regressed. Why, a historian finally asked, did feminism fail to con-
solidate and increase its gains after the 1920s? Changes in women's status,
he explained, had occurred more through chance of war, depression, and
technological change than through planned efforts.5' American women,
"like American society in general, have been more concerned with indi-
vidual practice than with a consistent feminist ideology."52 Thus, he con-
cluded, only a strong ideological stand would enable feminists to recognize
their goals consistently and continuously.
At the time that Degler and Potter made these generalizations about
women, a small number of historians began investigating more closely
women's political and social activities in the post-World War I decade.
They discovered that there was more to the new woman than the image of
the flapper had revealed, and their works offered compensatory balance to
former interpretations. Harking back to the emphasis on women's political
activities during the late 1920s, the new studies still did not elaborate on
the theme of women as an oppressed group, but they did present valuable
discussions of women's political efforts and incidentally acknowledged the
social barriers impeding emancipation.
One revision was implicit in Clarke A. Chambers' study of social service.
Chambers did not discuss feminism per se, but he did find women in the
1920s actively working in settlement houses, lobbying for wages and hours
'David M. Potter, "American Women and the American Character," John A. Hague,
ed., American Character and Culture: Some Twentieth Century Perspectives (DeLand, Fla.,
1964), 65-84.
1 Carl N. Degler, "Revolution Without Ideology: The Changing Place of Women in
America," Robert Jay Lifton, ed., The Woman in America (Boston, 1964), 197.
52 Ibid., 207.
New Woman 389
regulations and for safeguards for earlier protective legislation, and edu-
cating women workers. Chambers proposed that progressive thought did
not end in the 1920s but was tempered, to be drawn on heavily by the
New Deal.53 Anne Firor Scott's study of southern women confirmed that
women advanced progressivism in the 1920s and weakened historians'
monolithic interpretation of the new woman as flapper. Suffrage, she fou
greatly encouraged the political life of southern women and prompted
efforts for social and political reform. In several states Scott found women's
organizations investigating labor conditions, securing children and women's
legislation, and even organizing for interracial cooperation. In Georgia,
Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky, women's groups pursued state and
municipal government reform. At odds with entrenched politicians, south-
ern women's political progress was "not one to gladden Mrs. Catt's heart,"
yet their efforts persisted through the decade. However, the 1920s did not
witness a new morality in the South: "Through it all the outward aspect
of the Southern lady was normally maintained as the necessary precondition
of securing a hearing."54
James Stanley Lemons' study of postwar women cited successes such as
the Sheppard-Towner Act, new marriage and divorce laws, independent
citizenship (the Cable Act), and municipal reform, as well as organizations
such as the National Women's Trade Union League, the National League
of Women Voters, and the National Consumer's League and various pro-
fessional women's groups as proof that "the woman's rights movement
advanced progressivism in the period from World War I to the Great De-
pression."55 The list of legislation which the Women's Joint Congressional
Committee influenced successfully is a lengthy one, but most of its entries
are dated before 1925, for as Lemons shows, forces of reaction after
1925 shifted the emphasis of women's activities from goals of social justice
to goals of efficiency.56 Red-baiting, the defeat of the child labor amend-
ment, decisions of the Supreme Court barring protective legislation, and
the rejection of the Progressive party in the 1924 election placed progres-
sive women on the defensive. The equal rights amendment, Lemons be-
lieved, was "the hallmark of impatience in the 1920's, and it was an issue
6 Clarke A. Chambers, Seedtime of Reform: American Social Service and Social Action,
1918-1933 (Minneapolis, 1963), 82-83.
5 Anne Firor Scott, "After Suffrage: Southern Women in the Twenties," Journal of
Southern History, XXX (Aug. 1964), 298-318; Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady:
From Pedestal to Politics 1830-1930 (Chicago, 1970).
`5James S. Lemons, "The New Woman in the New Era: Woman Movement from the
Great War to the Great Depression" (doctoral dissertation, University of Missouri, 1967),
v, vi, 72-73.
56 Ibid., 77, 90-91, 100.
which helped fragment the women's movement and weaken the progressive
impulse. "57 Although the newly enfranchised sex had achieved no great
political gains in public office or party politics, women had continued to
push for reforms, laying the groundwork for the New Deal.
Not unrelated to these new interpretations of women in the 1920s was
an essay by James R. McGovern, which called into question earlier histo-
rians' periodization of the revolution in morals. Citing Breckinridge's sta-
tistics on the prewar occupational status of women, pre-1910 advertisements
depicting women, changing hair and cosmetic styles in the Progressive era,
dance crazes, the practice of birth control, and use of automobiles, Mc-
Govern showed that the flapper had been predated by events of the first
decades of the century. If, as McGovern suggested, a moral revolution
occurred before World War I, were the 1 920s as "revolutionary" as they
had been depicted, or in fact had a reaction taken place in which women
returned to home and family?58
The works of Scott on the southern woman's new political awareness,
Chambers and Lemons on progressivism and women in the 1920s, and the
reinvestigations of the moral revolution by McGovern and others may dif-
fer on many counts, but they all point to a new attitude toward women's
history. Prompted in part by the political and social movements of the
1960s, these authors looked more closely at the political lives of post-
World War I women and more critically at the supposed moral revolution.
While they were eager to praise the role women had played in political
movements, their researches laid the foundation for recent works which
are critical of the failures of the women's movement to achieve lasting
reform. Two current studies are evidence of the shift in view from woman
as emancipated participant to woman as the victim of discrimination. Wil-
liam O'Neill places the bulk of the blame for feminism's demise on women;
William Chafe faults American society for oppressing the "second sex."
Everyone Was Brave, O'Neill's history of feminism, was subtitled The
6 Ibid., 302. Another positive interpretation of women's political progress in the 1920s is
found in Martin Gruberg, Women in American Politics: An Assessment and Sourcebook
(Oshkosh, Wisc., 1968), 9-26.
5 James R. McGovern, "The American Woman's Pre-World War I Freedom in Manners
and Morals," Journal of American History, LV (Sept. 1968), 315-33. See also, Robert E.
Riegel, "Women's Clothes and Women's Rights," American Quarterly, XV (Fall 1963),
390-401; William L. O'Neill, Divorce in the Progressive Era (New Haven, 1967); and
Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence. A Study of the First Years of Our Own
Time 1912-1917 (Chicago, 1959). Kenneth A. Yellis noted that "The new woman seemed
to go into eclipse during the period of anxiety l[the Depression], but the chang
stances of World War II, including a manpower shortage, brought her out again." Kenneth
A. Yellis, "Prosperity's Child: Some Thoughts on the Flapper," American Quarterly, XXI
(Spring 1969), 64.
New Woman 391
Rise and Fall of Feminism in America, a phrase indicative of the author's

view of the 1920s:
The women's rights movement expired in the twenties from ailments that had
gone untreated in its glory days. Chief among them was the feminists' inability
to see that equal suffrage was almost the only issue holding the disparate elements
of the woman movement together.59
O'Neill found that politicians abandoned the women's movement when

no women's voting bloc appeared, and he offered several criticisms of
women's political activity. The author quoted-and made clear his agree-
ment with-a blatantly antifeminist assessment of women's suffrage which
claimed that the vote had done little more than to bring out such unde-
sirable traits of women as fussiness, primness, bossiness, and the tendency
to make unnecessary enemies. He further claimed that although the radicals
of the Woman's party correctly understood the discrimination against
women which existed'after 1920, their "knowledge did them little good
because the passions that led them to demand a feminist revival kept them
from effecting it."60
In nonpolitical realms, as well, O'Neill noted little progress toward
emancipation after 1920. The moral revolution had been rooted in the
prewar years, and "sexual freedom had little effect on the life styles of
most women," who still preferred the stability of home and family to the
life of the flapper. Professionalism among women declined by the mid-
1920s, he explained, because the novelty and "glamour" of the career
experience was wearing out, discrimination in salaries and promotions be-
came apparent to women, and the struggle between home and career ex-
hausted working women.61
O'Neill believed that the feminine mystique of fulfillment through
motherhood and home originated in the 1920s, when "feminism" came to
mean merely sexual liberation within the confines of domesticity. Home
economics became woman's professional realm, and femininity became the
" William O'Neill, Everyone Was Brave: The Rise and Fall of Feminism in America
(Chicago, 1969), 264. For a summary of William O'Neill's distinction between "social
feminism" and "hard-core feminism," see William L. O'Neill, "Feminism as a Radical
Ideology," Alfred F. Young, ed., Dissent: Explorations in the History of American Radical-
ism (DeKalb, Ill., 1968), 273-300. Another study which contributes to post-1920 women's
history but does not explicitly deal with the decline of feminism is David M. Kennedy's
Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven, 1970). If Margaret
Sanger is representative, which is unlikely, women activists rejected radicalism and left-
wing allegiances to pursue the acceptance of their activities by middle-class women. Could a
toning down of radicalism in the 1920s account for the view that feminism "disappeared?"
' O'Neill, Everyone Was Brave, 270-73, 291.
"IIbid., 306.
watchword for the "privatized young women."62 Although the ideas of

earlier feminists were kept alive by individuals such as Gilman, Dorothy
Bromley, Alice Beal Parsons, and Suzanne La Follette, by 1930 feminism
had fallen, to remain dormant until the present revival.
The second recent interpretation and one of greater usefulness is
Chafe's study of the changing roles of American women from 1920
to 1970. In an effort to correct what Degler called the "suffrage orienta-
tion of historians of women's rights," Chafe began after suffrage, and he
has provided a broad and preliminary investigation of women in politics,
industry, the professions, and other aspects of American life. Drawing on
several of the studies discussed above, he explored the progressive legisla-
tive successes of women in the early 1920s and acknowledged the indi-
vidual accomplishments of women in the peace movement, in the struggle for
social welfare legislation, and in municipal government reform. But in
general, Chafe found that women had failed to achieve political equality.
After surveying the political and sociological literature on voting behavior,
he attempted to explain women's political failure in terms of social forces
-cross-group pressures on women, discrimination rooted in the authoritar-
ian family structure and the sexual division of labor, and the absence of a
strong women's issue for the new voters to focus on. Chafe acknowledged
that economic advances by women were minimal. Although he believed
that sexually women had "substantially increased the amount of equality,"
he realized that "shifts in manners and morals did not interfere with the
perpetuation of a sexual division of labor." He dated the shift in emphasis
from careers to homemaking at 1930 and suggested that the Depression
merely wielded the final blow to feminist hopes for equality. Although
Chafe placed part of the blame for the decline of feminism on the feminists
themselves, especially their factionalism over the equal rights amendment,
his analysis emphasized social barriers to emancipation. "For economic
equality to become a reality," he wrote, "a fundamental revolution was
required in the way men and women thought of each other, and in the
distribution of responsibilities within marriage and the family.' '63
In the last few years, the literature on women in the 1920s has reached
a new level of historical inquiry. Historians are now trying to understand
the decline of feminism rather than to deny the need for further emanci-
pation. Although the revised version finds that women were politically
active in lobbying for reforms in spite of failures at the polls, the latest
accounts recognize that the 1920s were not the years of economic prosperity
62 Ibid., 313.
3 Chafe, "From Suffrage to Liberation," 56, 120, 185, 211-12. See also Mari Jo Buhle,
Ann G. Gordon, and Nancy Schrom, "Women in American Society: An Historical Contribu-
tion," Radical America, 5 (July-Aug. 1971), 3-66.
New Woman 393
for women described so proudly earlier: professional gains were minimal,

industrial wages discriminatory, and unionization difficult. Marriage and
motherhood brought most women out of the labor force and, supposedly,
home to domestic and sexual fulfillment. Historians have generally retained
the notion of the revolution in manners and morals, although research on
the prewar years and on literary stereotypes may indicate a need for re-
vision. How the social freedom in clothing, manners, and sex contributed
to deeper social change must be questioned further in light of the new
view of women's history. Rather than proclaiming the contributions of
"woman as force" in recent history, historians now explain feminism's
decline in terms of societal forces, such as family structure and political
trends, the weaknesses inherent in the pre-1920 suffrage coalition, and
legal and social discrimination against women as a group.
By further investigations of women's lives, historians can continue to
correct their past errors, not only for the sake of historical accuracy, but
also to begin to compensate for the disservice which earlier writings have
rendered. The portrayal of the 1920s as a period of full equality, when
in fact discrimination in education, hiring, salaries, promotions, and family
responsibilities was abundant, has perpetuated a myth of equality, one
which has helped undermine women's attainment of group consciousness.
Similarly, to write and teach-on the basis of unsubstantiated observations
-that women were politically apathetic but sexually active during the
1920s is to create sexually stereotyped historical roles for women. His-
torians' use of the "sexual revolution" as an explanation for women's his-
tory in the 1920s was perhaps an extension of their own inability to con-
ceive of women outside of sexual roles. Furthermore, if the admittedly min-
imal evidence on writings in the 1930s and 1940s is substantiated, Amer-
ican historians' emphasis on woman's place in the home rather than her
capacities for non-domestic careers may have contributed to the perpetua-
tion of cultural stereotypes which helped weaken feminism since 1920.
The work of recent historians begins the long overdue revision of his-
torical attitudes toward women. The most serious of the problems which
recent studies manifest is that of excessive generalization-the tendency
to write about the American woman, when race, class, region, and ethnicity
have significantly divided women in twentieth-century America. Perhaps
by studying the lives of countless individual women during the 1920s and
after scholars will begin to discover patterns of response to both oppor-
tunities and discrimination. Only after extensive research has been com-
pleted can historians generalize successfully about the new woman. Only
then can they begin to certify whether women were active participants or
struggling victims in American history.

Freedman, The New Woman

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Freedman, The New Woman

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Freedman, The New Woman

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The New Woman: Changing Views of Women in the 1920s

Author(s): Estelle B. Freedman

IN his suggestive article, "What Happened to the Progressive Movemen

Estelle B. Freedman is an instructor of history in Princeton University.

William E. Leuchtenburg reached a similar conclusion nearly three decades

These and other accounts have attributed several characteristics to the

'Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties

pretations of the new woman from the

5Gerda Lerner, "Women's Rights and American Feminism," American Scholar, 40

pected; from what h

'Charlotte Perkins Gilm

12 "Ten Years of Woman Suffrage," 11.

and nonprofessional jobs and greater sexual freedom. Nevertheless they

21 Allen, Only Yesterday, 97-109.

they were severely restricted in their range of employment. In the realm of

offer moral support to families in a time of crisis.25 When rearmament and

of women in the 1920s displayed ambivalance toward working women.

Dumond, Roosevelt to Roosevelt, 60. The Women's Joint Congressional Committee

Woman's party of upper-class and professional women supported the

Rise and Fall of Feminism in America, a phrase indicative of the author's

O'Neill found that politicians abandoned the women's movement when

watchword for the "privatized young women."62 Although the ideas of

for women described so proudly earlier: professional gains were minimal,

You might also like