Flapper (16 page)

Lipstick reported that the entire event was “very exciting” until a “big Irish cop regarded me with a sad eye and remarked, ‘Kid, you’re too good for this dump,’ and politely opened a window leading to the fire escape. I made a graceful exit.”

It was vintage Lois Long. And her readers loved every word of it.

First-wave feminists marching for women’s suffrage in New York City, May 6, 1912.

11
T
HESE
M
ODERN
W
OMEN

I
RONICALLY
, the 1920s flapper sustained some of her fiercest criticism not from the Christian moralists or spokesmen for the older generation, not from politically conservative men, but from hard-line feminists. Whereas once the women’s rights movement had mobilized millions of activists around important issues like suffrage, occupational health and safety, income equality, and legal rights, the New Woman of the 1920s—women like Lois Long and Zelda Fitzgerald—struck many veteran feminists as an apolitical creature interested only in romantic and sexual frivolities.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the celebrated author and activist, scored younger women for their “licentiousness.”
¹
And Lillian Symes, another old hand in the women’s movement, found that her “own generation of feminists in the pre-war days had as little in common with the flat-heeled, unpowdered, pioneer suffragette” of the nineteenth century “as it has with the post-war, spike-heeled, over-rouged flapper of to-day.
²
We grew up before the post-war disillusionment engulfed the youth of the land and created futilitarian literature, gin parties, and jazz babies.”

Symes’s generation of feminists—women who came of age just before World War I—weren’t prudes. They were “determined to have both, to try for everything life would offer of love, happiness, and freedom—just like men.” This didn’t entail a rejection of femininity. The key notion was balance.

“If in those younger days we believed didactically in our right to smoke and drink, we considered over-indulgence in either ‘rather sloppy’ if not anti-social,” she wrote. “If we talked about free love and if a few even practiced it ‘as a matter of principle,’ we should have been thoroughly revolted by the promiscuous pawing and petting permitted by so many technically virtuous younger women today.… If all this makes us sound like prigs, I can assure you we were not. We made ourselves as attractive as we knew how to be, we were particular about our clothes, and few of us ever ‘sat out’ dances.”

Many prewar activists agreed that “sex rights”—“the right of women to a frank enjoyment of the sensuous side of the sex-relation”—deserved an important place in the feminist agenda.
³
Like their flapper successors, they also sought new meaning and fulfillment in romance.

In 1926, Freda Kirchwey, editor of the liberal journal
The Nation
, solicited autobiographical essays from a group of seventeen feminist leaders, most of them middle-aged women who grew up before the war. All but three were or had been married at some time during their lives. Their stories, which ran under the banner “These Modern Women,” revealed an almost uniform desire to balance career and family and to stake out a new and satisfying kind of “companionate marriage” in which husbands and wives interacted as friends and equals in their relationships.
⁴

Most of these women were also social activists. Their feminism combined a concern for the personal
and
the political.

In the prewar years, prominent radical women in New York had even founded a group called Heterodoxy, which convened regularly at a Greenwich Village restaurant to discuss sex, romance, politics, and culture.
⁵
Some of the participants practiced heterosexual free love, others were involved in long-term monogamous relationships with men; some were lesbians, and some were celibate. Heterodoxy celebrated the idea of free choice and personal fulfillment.

As Lillian Symes noted, prewar feminists had matched their burning desire for personal fulfillment with an intense engagement in the world around them. “While we were not all political radicals,” she
maintained, “we were examining our socio-economic order and our sex mores with an inquisitive and skeptical eye.”
⁶

But the Jazz Age flapper? She was another matter entirely. Disengaged from politics, more interested in shopping than picketing, drunk on the ethic of sexual freedom and romance, the flapper struck many feminists as misguided at best. At worst, a sellout.

The ferocity of these attacks betrayed some of the deep political fissures that ran through feminist circles after World War I. Having won the vote in 1920, women’s rights activists now faced the daunting challenge of reconciling sharply divergent ideologies and priorities that threatened to rend the movement in two just as it graduated into the mainstream of American life. With feminists now engaged in a hot contest over just what “feminism” really meant, the flapper became a convenient whipping girl who could unite competing factions in universal condemnation and scorn.

American women had certainly traveled a long road from rural Seneca Falls, in upstate New York, where one hundred people convened on July 19, 1848, to sign a “Declaration of Sentiments” drafted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
⁷
Borrowing directly from the Declaration of Independence, these early activists boldly averred that “all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights: that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

The generation of women’s rights activists who lent their names to this creed had cut their political teeth on radical abolitionism. Stirred by William Lloyd Garrison’s cry for an immediate and unconditional end to chattel slavery, crusaders like Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott built a strong argument for women’s emancipation on the very same natural rights foundation that informed the abolitionist movement. If all men were equal—unlike most of the country, abolitionists believed passionately that this was the case—weren’t men and women also equal to each other? If it was wrong to hold humans in bondage, wasn’t it also wrong to deny women the right to vote, hold property, sit on juries, enter the professions, and enjoy equal treatment in divorce and custody proceedings?
The founders of the women’s movement thought so, as did many of their male abolitionist supporters like Garrison, Bronson Alcott, Wendell Phillips, Gerrit Smith, Theodore Parker, and Frederick Douglass.

But times changed, and so did the women’s rights movement.

Over the next seventy-five years, no one could have appreciated better the strange trajectory of American protofeminism than Charlotte Woodward, a nineteen-year-old farmer’s daughter who traveled all day by horse-drawn cart to attend the Seneca Falls convention.
⁸
Woodward, who dreamed of being a typesetter (and, in the words of a perceptive historian, “might as well have aspired to fly to the moon”), was the only signer of the Declaration of Sentiments who lived to see the Nineteenth Amendment ratified in 1920.

In Woodward’s youth, crusaders for women’s rights rested their argument on the logic of absolute equality. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of Charlotte’s early heroes, acknowledged that men and women were not “the same and identical”—either by nature or nurture, women were more moral and kind, men more aggressive and dogmatic. But the
“rights
of every human being are the same and identical.”
⁹

By the turn of the century, as Charlotte Woodward edged toward middle age and august pioneers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony passed from the scene, a new generation of women’s leaders shifted the emphasis of the suffrage argument. Out of expediency, they accepted at face value the predominant Victorian belief that women and men were inexorably different and maybe just a little unequal.

According to prevailing wisdom, it was a woman’s natural role to provide a stable, soothing home life for her husband and to confer an ethical education on her children.
¹⁰
Left to their own devices, men were easily given over to excess and decadence. The same emerging industrial economy that demanded sober, self-controlled employees to staff its factories and offices needed wives and mothers to exert a civilizing influence at home. In the absence of that civilizing influence, men would never learn to master their impulses and lead the kinds of sturdy, disciplined lives that would make them good employees in a new, industrial order.

This was always a false ideal. Middle-class Americans could comfortably espouse the virtues of separate spheres, but for millions of women in the textile mills of New England and the Piedmont, the garment factories of Chicago and New York, and the cotton fields of Mississippi and Alabama, the grind of poverty demanded that sons and daughters share equally in the punishing routine of wage labor.

To many second-generation suffragists, most of whom hailed from comfortable, middle-class backgrounds, whether or not the Victorian gender system actually mirrored reality was entirely beside the point.
¹¹
It was popular and enjoyed wide support, especially among men of influence. Rather than fight the gender code, suffragists used it to their advantage. In a rapidly industrializing and urban nation where the line between public and private was often blurred, they claimed, a woman could not fulfill her duty to safeguard the domestic sphere unless she was granted political rights.

“Women who live in the country sweep their own dooryards and … either feed the refuse of the table to a flock of chickens or allow it innocently to decay in the open air and sunshine,” wrote the distinguished settlement house founder Jane Addams in an article entitled “Why Women Should Vote.”
¹²
But in “a crowded city quarter … if the street is not cleaned by the city authorities no amount of private sweeping will keep the tenement free from grime; if the garbage is not properly collected and destroyed a tenement house mother may see her children sicken and die of diseases.…”

The modern world was too complex to sustain rigid divisions between public and domestic spheres, Addams explained. People now lived in closer quarters, bought most of their food and household items from stores, and came into daily contact with urban blight and vice. In short, “If woman would keep on with her old business of caring for her house and rearing her children she will have to have some conscience in regard to public affairs lying outside of her immediate household.”

“Women’s place is Home,” Rheta Childe Dorr affirmed in 1910.
¹³
“But home is not contained within the four walls of an individual house. Home is community. The city full of people is the Family. The
public school is the real Nursery. And badly do Home and Family need their mother.”

This rationale for equal suffrage resonated with many Americans who were prepared to grant women a role in politics but weren’t ready to reject Victorian notions about gender difference. So in the years before World War I, at thousands of dramatic torchlight parades and petition drives, mainstream suffragists softened the potentially radical implications of their cause by insisting that women wanted the vote primarily to be better wives and mothers—not to engage in a power grab or to press unorthodox ideas on an unwilling nation. It proved a winning formula.

But in the wake of their stunning constitutional victory in 1920, former allies in the suffrage cause found themselves torn over the implications of this argument.

Over the preceding decade, even as it pressed for equal suffrage, the women’s lobby had also pressured states into enacting maximum work hours for women.
¹⁴
By 1925, all but four states bent to political pressure and set anywhere between eight-hour and ten-hour workdays for women. Other states even banned women from working at night or set minimum wages for women workers. The women’s lobby had also campaigned for health and safety measures that would shield women from the ruinous effects of industrial work. In an era when few Americans enjoyed any real protection against the whims of their employers, these statutes succeeded in alleviating some of the most egregious conditions for women who toiled in textile factories in Paterson, New Jersey, or fruit canneries in Los Angeles.

But in order to justify these laws—in order to get the legislatures to pass them and the courts to uphold them—feminists had to concede that women needed special shelter from mental, emotional, and bodily harm.
¹⁵
If women were naturally weaker than men—and this is precisely what future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis famously argued in the 1908 case
Muller v. Oregon
, which established a legal precedent for women’s labor laws—then the state had a compelling public interest in extending them special protection.