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The 1920s were a time of dramatic changes in the United States, but these changes did not occur evenly throughout the nation. Many young Americans, especially those who lived in urban areas, embraced a new morality and participated in fads and opportunities that were not available to rural Americans.
The “new generation” (a title applied by historians) embraced new hairstyles and clothing. Women bobbed their hair and wore short skirts. Young men and women alike listened and danced to jazz, which featured quick rhythms and improvisational melodies, unlike older forms of popular music. They purchased consumer goods produced by the postwar economy, often on credit, and attended sporting events and films.
Some observers concluded that the new generation signaled the emergence of a new society in the United States, one based on consumerism and material indulgence instead of hard work and responsibility. However, the “new generation” was primarily an urban phenomenon. Additionally, many of the attempts to determine what its appearance meant for American society centered on the role of women.
One reason the 1920s provided new opportunities for a “new generation” was the appearance of new forms of transportation and production. Henry Ford’s Model T, for example, made automobile ownership available to average Americans and created new opportunities for mobility.
Ford did not invent the automobile. Hundreds of auto manufacturers were in business in Europe and the United States in the early 20th century. However, their cars were too expensive for most consumers.
Ford’s innovation was to use mass production to manufacture automobiles. He revolutionized automobile manufacturing (and industrial production in general) with the assembly line.
The assembly line valued efficiency above craftsmanship. During the manufacturing process, a product moved along the line from one team of workers to the next. Each worker or team had a specific job to complete; most of them were so simple and repetitive that workers could be, in Ford’s words, “no smarter than an ox.” To maximize production, Ford applied the principles of scientific management, including time-motion studies, which evaluated workers’ movements to ensure no effort was wasted.
Ford’s assembly line was a boon for American consumers, because it increased the availability of automobiles and decreased prices.
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Ford implemented the assembly line in his Detroit factories in 1921. By the end of the year, his company had produced 1 million Model Ts. By 1924, the price of a Model T dropped to $300, putting car ownership within reach for many Americans, including those who worked in Ford’s factories.The assembly line had some disadvantages for American workers. Assembly-line work reduced interaction between workers and employers. The repetitive (boring) nature of assembly-line work led to a high worker turnover rate in Ford’s factories and in other workplaces that adopted the strategy. Also, Henry Ford was anti-union: He forbade his laborers to unionize.
To dissuade workers from leaving or from unionizing, Ford and other business leaders in the 1920s developed ways to compensate and retain workers through a benefits program that historians refer to as welfare capitalism.
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Ford became famous for paying his workers $5 a day (almost double the wage paid by other companies) and limiting the workday at his factories to 8 hr (which was less than the average). He also paid White and Black workers equally. This led many African Americans from the South to move to Detroit.Ford’s Model T, along with his business and manufacturing practices, enabled the automobile to change America during the 20th century, much like the railroads had done during the 19th century:
Innovations in the automobile industry influenced more than transportation and labor. As access to coal-powered electricity in cities increased and the electric motor was made more efficient, inventors created a variety of new household appliances.
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New innovations, including radios, phonographs, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and refrigerators, appeared on the market during the 1920s.Credit and installment plans made the new goods available to more people, especially those who lived in urban areas.
The mass consumption of cars, household appliances, ready-to-wear clothing, and processed foods depended on the work of advertisers. Magazines, including Ladies’ Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post, connected advertisers with consumers. Colorful (and sometimes provocative) print ads decorated the pages of these publications and became a staple of American popular culture.
Manufacturers and advertisers also reached out to consumers through radio, which emerged as a popular medium during the 1920s. Hundreds of radio stations appeared during the decade. Many of them broadcast the news, serial stories, and political speeches. Like the print media, radio entertainment was interspersed with advertisements.
Advertisements during the 1920s promoted a wide range of products. They transformed luxury items and mundane goods into everyday necessities. The advertisement above, for Palmolive soap, appeared in Ladies’ Home Journal in 1922. It claimed that the soap’s “moderate price is due to popularity, to the enormous demand which keeps Palmolive factories working day and night,” so “the old-time luxury of the few may now be enjoyed the world over.”
Many advertisements were directed at women. Advertisers and manufacturers often promised that new domestic labor-saving devices like vacuum cleaners and washing machines would enable women to expand their horizons. Ironically, these labor-saving devices led to more work for women by raising expectations regarding domestic labor. Using these tools, women cleaned more frequently, washed more often, and cooked more elaborate meals, rather than gaining spare time.
The emergence of automobiles, advertising, and radio led some individuals, including many young people who lived in cities, to live according to a new morality. Some young women challenged traditional expectations regarding their relationship to home life—a challenge implied by many advertisements of the period. This new morality was more permissive and challenged traditional gender stereotypes. For example, many young women adopted the dress and mannerisms of the flapper.
Flappers wore shorter skirts, shorter hair, and more makeup. They drank and smoked with men in public. Their dresses fell in straight lines from shoulders to knees, de-emphasizing breasts and hips while highlighting legs and ankles.
As women and men pushed social and cultural boundaries during the 1920s, sexual behavior changed and social customs grew more permissive.
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“Petting parties” or “necking parties” became the rage on college campuses during the 1920s. Darkened movie theaters and private automobiles also provided unsupervised spaces for young, urban men and women to interact. This could be liberating for women, but it also required them to negotiate sexual exchanges in new and unfamiliar ways.The rise of the new morality (and its embodiment as flappers) should not be seen only as an outcome of prosperity. This trend was part of the larger women’s rights movement.
Following the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which guaranteed full voting rights for women, some women attempted to match their gains in civil rights with social advances. They announced the arrival of an independent new woman who was not dependent on a father or husband.
One of the most important supporters of the new woman was Margaret Sanger, a proponent of birth control. Sanger, who founded Planned Parenthood, advocated for women’s access to information about reproduction and birth-control devices. She challenged state laws that forbade the dissemination of information and devices, which were deemed “obscene.”
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In 1916, Sanger was jailed for 1 month after opening a clinic in Brooklyn that distributed pamphlets and contraceptive devices to working-class immigrants.The struggle for women’s rights was also fought in Congress, where an important division within the movement—between those who viewed women as, fundamentally, wives and mothers and those who sought individual rights and autonomy equal to men—was revealed.
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In 1921, Congress passed the Promotion of the Welfare and Hygiene of Maternity and Infancy Act, also known as the Sheppard-Towner Act, which earmarked $1.25 million for well-baby clinics, educational programs, and nursing.EXAMPLE
In 1923, suffragist Alice Paul drafted and promoted an Equal Rights Amendment to end sexual discrimination by guaranteeing that “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.”Many women, and many members of Congress, supported the Sheppard-Towner Act because it provided much-needed federal assistance to mothers and children. Funding provided through the act dramatically reduced infant mortality in the United States during the 1920s. There was much less support for equal rights, however. The women’s rights movement was divided over the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Many believed they had achieved their goal with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Fearing that the ratification of the ERA would lead Congress to retract its support for Sheppard-Towner, as well as for laws that limited women’s working hours, and provisions that recognized their status as mothers, many women’s organizations opposed the ERA.
Debates over the “new woman” and motherhood occurred in part because, during the 1920s, the number of women in the workforce continued to increase—not only in domestic service but also in retail, health care, education, business offices, and manufacturing. Women were paid less than men (for the same type of work) based on the assumption that they did not have to support families. The employment of single, unmarried women was, for the most part, accepted. However, married women were encouraged by employers and other men to stay home instead of working. Women who continued to work after marriage were often stigmatized. It was claimed that they worked only to earn money that they could spend frivolously.
Source: This tutorial curated and/or authored by Matthew Pearce, Ph.D with content adapted from Openstax “U.S. History”. access for free at openstax.org/details/books/us-history LICENSE: CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION 4.0 INTERNATIONAL