A Lady's Life in 1920s America: A Thursday at Home

Previously on The Exploress, we spent our day learning about what life was like for some 1920s working women. Around 8 million women were working outside the home in 1920s America, and society made a pretty big deal about it. But here’s the thing…way more women than that were, and long had been, working. They were just doing that work at home. In the 1920s, the vast majority of women (we’re talking more than 40 million) were busy at home with domestic labor and childcare. So what did that look like? Today, we’re going to find out, and explore what life was like for the average housewife in 1926. Roll up your sleeves, grab your apron, and plug in our handy dandy vacuum. Let’s go traveling. 

bibliography

Books & Academic Journals

  • Janice Williams Rutherford, Selling Mrs. Consumer: Christine Frederick and the Rise of Household Efficiency, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. 

  • Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave, New York: Basic Books, 1985.

  • Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.  

  • Peter N. Stearns, Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America, New York: New York University Press, 2003.

  • Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. 

  • David E. Kyvig, Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1940: How Americans Lived Through the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004. 

  • Janice Williams Rutherford, “A Foot in Each Sphere: Christine Frederick and Early Twentieth-Century Advertising,” The Historian 63, no. 1 (Fall 2000): 67-86. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24450847

  • Laurel D. Graham, “Domesticating Efficiency: Lillian Gilbreth’s Scientific Management of Homemakers, 1924-1930,” Signs 24, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 633-675. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3175321

  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1898. https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/gilman/economics/economics.html

  • V. Sue Atkinson, “Every Picture Tells a Story: Parenting Advice Books Provide a Window on the Past,” Social Sciences 11, no. 1 (December  2021). https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/11/1/11

  • Helen Zoe Veit, Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469607719_veit

Online Sources

So here we are, in 1926. We’ve arrived in an era when plenty of young, single women have just entered the workforce, but most (especially wives and mothers) have not. They stay at home – to cook, clean, and raise their children. And while domestic labor might not be considered “work” by some, it is, and always will be. It’s just that it happens to be unpaid work. Though, before the 1920s, it wasn’t always. Many upper and middle-class Americans once paid domestic staff to cook and clean for them and help them raise their children. In the 1920s, many women still make paychecks as domestic servants. But this era also ushers in a sea change to the landscape of domestic labor. Domestic servants will all but disappear by the 1930s, in the homes of all but the most wealthy Americans. Society has decided it’s time to stop paying professionals and let our female family members do the work. It’s not even work, then, is it? It’s a chore–an expected and totally reasonable domestic duty.This paradigm shift still affects many women in our era. So how did the whole thing come about?

One of the main reasons is that, for the first time in history, American society is plagued by a servant shortage. Domestic servants have always been a staple of American society, and an important part of the workforce. Middle and upper class women were able to rely on domestic servants; the ability to hire them was what separated the middle from the working class. It was a mark of wealth if you didn’t have to do the physical labor involved in housework. Most middle class women couldn’t afford full time, live-in servants, Downton Abbey style, but many did employ domestics. They often worked for several families at once, serving part-time, or only coming to clean on certain days. Hey, it was better than nothing.

But in the 1920s, women stopped being so keen on being servants. In past eras, this was one of the only jobs open to us ladies, so there was a fairly large servant pool to choose from. Now, though, as we found out last episode, most working-class women have a variety of other, better jobs to choose from. Scores of women leave domestic service roles in favor of, say, working in factories. Being a servant means irregular working hours, being subjected to the whims of your employer, low social status, low pay, and, sometimes, having to live in your employer’s house, and be on call 24/7. There is little privacy and freedom. As one former servant wrote, “My first employer was a smart, energetic woman. I had a good room and everything nice, and she gave me a great many things, but I’d have spared them all if only I could have had a little time to myself.” 

Factory work might be more dangerous than housework, but it comes with higher pay, more stable hours, and in some cases, a touch of glamor, at least for white women. By 1930, black women constitute nearly half of America’s domestic servant population, because most of these new jobs aren’t open to them. Domestic service is still one of the only ways that black women can make a living, perpetuating the idea that they are somehow meant to serve. Indeed, the “Mammy” figure stereotype, rooted in slavery, will persist throughout and beyond this decade; for evidence, look no further than the advertisements for Aunt Jemima’s pancake syrup.

The newspapers of the 1920s ran all sorts of dramatic headlines lamenting what they called “the servant problem.” But instead of raising wages, or creating better working conditions to lure women back into domestic service, home economists argue that middle class women are better off just doing all the work themselves. They rebrand domestic labor as a noble, intellectually challenging “profession” rather than repetitive drudgery to be outsourced. What was once lowly servitude for paid employees is now being sold as a prestigious labor of love. Not for men, though, obviously! They have real work to do. 

Home economists think this is brilliant, and society (i.e. men) love the idea too, because of course they do. Home economists claim to be “professionalizing” housekeeping and homemaking, and they insist this change is actually good. Not only should wives and mothers do all this labor themselves, but they can even do it better than domestic servants… as long as they have the home economics training and knowledge to do so. (This can be found in women’s magazines, of course.) This “professionalization” of housekeeping is just a bit of a misbranding. A profession, by definition, is a paid occupation. A domestic servant had been paid for her work, so housekeeping was her profession. But expecting women to perform unpaid domestic labor full time is actually deprofessionalization. 

“It’s actually better though,” your friendly neighborhood home economist shouts! She argues that because middle class (white) housewives are naturally more intelligent servants, they will do a better job of housekeeping, even though they are not getting paid. And besides, they don’t really want to get paid, because they are doing it out of love for their families, and love is payment enough. Um, objection? Home economists often suggest that the most intelligent women make the best homemakers. They are constantly honing their cooking skills and reading up on the best new ways to clean a toilet. Intelligence, then, becomes a prized attribute in women because it’s considered the mark of a successful housekeeper. One home economist wrote that with an “intelligent attitude of mind” any woman could understand that “home making is not drudgery,” and that it was just as interesting as any other field, provided you studied your magazines, and cookbooks diligently, of course. 

HOME EC: Teaching the Art of Housework

We keep talking about these home economists… Let's back up and define what that term actually means. It isn’t a new field in the 1920s, but it explodes during the decade. Home economics was popularized in the 1860s by Catherine Beecher, in order to try and “redeem women’s profession from dishonor.” Why was it dishonorable? Probably because it is thankless unpaid work, Catherine! Nonetheless, she tried to glorify domestic labor by writing instructional books on housekeeping, trying to convince her readers that their duties (though tedious) were important work assigned to women by both Nature and God. The books sold extremely well, which caused more women to write similar books; thus the field of home economics, or the study of housekeeping and homemaking, was born. 

By the 1920s, home economics has expanded to encompass everything from nutrition to child psychology to budgeting to personal hygiene. It’s officially been legitimized as a “professional full time occupation.” Which is part of why, when we say we want to go away to college, society says, great! Go off and learn how to clean better. By 1928, 1 in 3 girls will be enrolled in high school home economics classes, and many colleges offer or require them. The thinking is that men are being trained for work, so women should be trained for it too. Except many men are uncomfortable with the idea of training women for the same kinds of work they do. Instead, they argue that learning home economics prepares women for their true vocation – the home and the family. There’s no point in a woman going to college if she never learns the basics of running a household. And no one wants an ill prepared wife…the horror! 

But it’s not hard to feel like an ill prepared wife, because the 1920s is the age of the expert. We ladies now have pediatricians screaming at us about breastfeeding, nutritionists screaming about breast milk temperature, advertisements screaming about lead nipple shields. There really isn’t any area of our lives that they aren’t screaming about, to be honest. It’s not our fault: there is just so much information to keep up with. One home economist wrote, “I believe that many a home… is not what it ought to be, not because the woman is not trying to do her part, but because she does not know how.” Cool, thanks. The “scientification” of housework pressures women to keep up with rapidly rising standards. You, too, can be a perfect housewife, as long as you meticulously follow these 57 rules and buy these 8 products! Most of us do know how to do the laundry just fine, thank you; it’s just that the bar for domestic perfection has been raised to impossible heights. Washing clothes once a week is no longer good enough, now that ready-made clothing and washing machines are available. If your husband doesn’t have a perfectly pressed outfit that smells lemony fresh every day, what are you doing? Advertisers are largely driving these rising standards, playing on women’s fears that their neighbors will judge them if they aren’t using the latest washing machine. Keeping up with the Joneses becomes a popular comic strip in the 1920s for a reason.  

HOME EXPERTS

But not everyone is drinking the home economics Kool-aid. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for one, wasn’t convinced that the solution to the servant problem was women taking on unpaid labor. Her book, Women and Economics, which was written at the turn of the century, is a study of women’s dependence on men, in which she argues that by buying into the idea that women should stay at home and be financially supported by their husbands, women become economic parasites. She wrote, “We are the only animal species in which the sex-relation is also an economic relation.” Gilman believed that equality would only be achieved when men stopped economically supporting women. Cooperative housekeeping was a far better solution to the servant problem, because it would allow women to utilize the best features of capitalism, like organization and division of labor, for their own advancement out of home and into the office, where they would finally be paid.

After all, why should millions of women complete the exact same thirty tasks each day by themselves? It’s an inefficient and costly way to tackle domestic labor – why have 20 different women cooking dinner in 20 different ovens when they can work together and divide the load? “We have to pay severally for all these stoves and dishes, tools and utensils, which if properly supplied in one proper place instead of twenty, would cost far less to begin with.” Gilman wanted to outsource cooking to community kitchens, laundry to commercial laundromats, and childcare to public nurseries. She envisioned a world in which families would pay money to frequent these establishments, all of which would be run by paid female employees. Freed of these tasks, wives could then join their husbands in working and collecting a paycheck, no longer financially dependent upon them. Maybe she was onto something there. 

But Charlotte’s grand plans didn’t involve making men any money…so nobody listened to her. Instead, we’re listening to Lillian Gilbreth and Christine Fredericks, two self-proclaimed efficiency experts who, rather ironically, make careers out of telling women not to have careers. They position themselves as the experts on “professional” homemaking, and are paid by men to tell women which products they should buy. Once advertisers figured out that 82% of American consumers were, in fact, women, they decide to hire female home economics experts as consultants. (In a shocking twist, these male advertisers prefer hiring one-off, outside lady consultants rather than just, you know… hiring female co-workers.) Gilbreth and Fredericks aren’t the only women making a living this way, but they are by far the most influential. So let’s meet them. 

Lillian Gilbreth had a whopping 12 children with her husband, Frank, and wrote an autobiography about it, which formed the basis for the 1950s film Cheaper by the Dozen. Lillian and Frank were fascinated with the concept of scientific management and efficiency, and they create a business working together as engineers. Their work is often published, and their business thrives. And although Lillian is the one with the PhD, and Frank never even went to college, he is often the only one credited for their work. Lillian doesn’t really care…until 1924, when Frank dies unexpectedly. She quickly realizes that no one is going to hire an uncredited female engineer. So, with 12 mouths to feed, Lillian is forced to try and make a crust in the one field where being a woman actually gives you authority: home economics. In that field, she finds she is able to build a career as an efficiency expert; I mean, look at her, being so efficient that she supports 12 kids and has a full time job. She successfully leans into an“organize your kitchen like me, and you too can do it all!” brand. Thanks, Lillian.

Soon Lillian is receiving salaried contracts designing model kitchens for companies banking on her newfound fame. It is here that Lillian actually gets to use her engineering degree, getting to work trying to maximize space, minimize physical labor, and increase efficiency. She is credited with inventing the foot pedal trash can, adding shelves to refrigerator doors, wall light switches, a uniform height for working surfaces in the kitchen, a circular work space layout, and designing the work triangle between the sink, stove, and fridge to maximize walking routes. She is widely considered America’s First Lady of Engineering in our era, but in the 1920s, she is lauded as the ultimate professional housewife. And it’s what paid her bills. The catch? Lillian actually hated housework. She always had a servant to help cook and clean for her: let’s face it, she needed one. She wasn’t designing kitchens and collecting paychecks in her own kitchen, after all. 

Christine Frederick, on the other hand, spends lots of time in her kitchen. After college, Christine married a businessman who was studying the principles of scientific management. Like Lillian, Christine became deeply interested in her husband’s work, and found it far more exciting than, you know, doing housework. In fact, she absolutely hated all the toil and boredom, and so she experiments with applying the principles of scientific management to the work. She builds the “Applecroft Home Experiment Station,” in her home, and solicits sample wares of home products from manufacturers to test in her kitchen. Then she writes reviews about them in magazines and booklets. Soon, magazines and manufacturers are commissioning her to write copy about a variety of household appliances. An early domestic influencer, for sure.

Christine goes on to write several books about household efficiency, with tips on how kitchen equipment should be arranged, diagrams to show women how to clean their houses more quickly, and meal planning schedules with ingredient purchasing sheets. Christine continually stresses the intelligence needed to be a successful housewife:“Today, the woman in the home is called upon to be an executive as well as a manual laborer. The more planning, the more brains, the more management a woman puts into her housework, the less friction and the less nervous energy she will have to expend.” Advertisers begin hiring her to consult on ad campaigns, seeing Christine as the expert on the “female consumer.” In 1920, she became the first woman to address the annual convention of the Associated Advertising Clubs of the World, where she argued that a woman’s viewpoint was necessary to create advertising for home products. Her influential 1929 book, Selling Mrs. Consumer, which discusses the importance of female purchasing power and female consumption patterns, will become a bible for male advertisers.

Christine is a complex character. She continually said that, “Woman’s true position is in her home. It is here that her highest development is attained; here is her greatest field of usefulness.” And yet…she hated doing the housework so much that she created a whole career for herself in advertising. She was a hypocrite, for sure, especially considering she also once said, “Our greatest enemy is the woman with the career” who feel “weighted down” by housework.” She also likes to claim that staying at home is the only way women can gain self-respect… without respecting the very housewives that helped to build her career in the first place. In her presentations to male advertisers, Christine often belittles the intelligence of female consumers, even as she claims they hold the power, remarking that advertising campaigns were,“often pathetically over the housewife’s pretty head.” Sexist remarks like this one might actually be why so many male advertisers listen to Christine’s advice like it was gospel. She became a powerful figure in the world of advertising, which had long been a male-only club. And she enjoyed it. In 1921, when asked to list her hobbies, she replied that second only to her family, her favorite hobby was “addressing 3,000 men.”  

SELLING TIME

With the blessing of home economists like Christine and Lillian, advertisers set about selling everything from refrigerators and vacuum cleaners to mops and waffle irons by preying on women’s emotions. They use guilt and insecurity (“if you don’t feed your baby this formula, you are a bad mom”), embarrassment (“your husband will leave you if you don’t gargle with this particular mouthwash), and fear (your son will get sick if you don’t use these tissues). Utility companies are particularly committed to telling women how much time they’ll save by buying electric products. One ad showed a smiling mother with a vacuum cleaner, and reads, “This is the test of a successful mother – she puts first things first. She does not give to sweeping the time that belongs to her children.” Yes, apparently buying an electric vacuum cleaner makes you a better mother! Advertisements actively celebrate electricity’s ability to ease women’s domestic burdens. One magazine spread for an all-electric kitchen reads, “What Every Woman Wants… A Kitchen Where Work is Easy!” And I mean, yes, for sure.

Many of these also feature happy, attractive, well-dressed women playing with their children or lounging on the couch, because of all the “time” they saved by doing the housework with new technologies. The vacuum cleaner is perhaps the hottest ticket item; by the end of the 1920s, most women will have one in their homes. Although vacuum cleaners were invented well before the 1920s, it’s the newly affordable Hoover 700 that really captures the market, with its aluminum body, nifty on/off switch, and innovative agitator brushroll. One delighted home economist writes, “the vacuum cleaner has in a measure done away with housecleaning. The old fashion of having a semi-annual upheaval and general misery produced through the household is no longer essential to cleanliness.” Ladies, rejoice! The Hoover has liberated us from housecleaning entirely! Oh, wait, no…sorry. Scratch that.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that in the 1920s, women love vacuuming… and HATE doing the laundry. So let’s take a minute to talk about laundry, referred to as “the herculean task which all women dread,” and “the American housekeeper’s hardest problem.” 

Laundry is despised because of the massive time and effort it involves. Back at the turn of the century, home washing machines were hand-powered; commercial machines involved steam and belts. That changed in the 19-tens with America’s first commercial electric washers. They involved a drum-type machine complete with galvanized tub. But don’t get too excited: while electric washing machines do exist, four out of five American homes don’t own one in the 1920s. This will dramatically increase during the decade - by 1929, about 38% of electrified households will have them - but most people can’t afford them.And remember that many Americans, especially in the rural areas, don’t even have electricity. Plus, they aren’t exactly the ‘throw clothes in and press start’ situations we have the luxury of using in our era. For most us work at home gals, one load of washing requires about 400 pounds of water, which has to be moved from pump or sink to stove, and then to the tub. Clothes then have to be rubbed, washed, boiled, rinsed, wrung, lifted, hung to dry, taken down, and ironed on the stove. It’s such a nuisance that if families ever have any discretionary money, women are immediately using it to jettison the laundry… even poorer families often send their laundry out rather than washing clothes themselves.

Laundry is considered so unpleasant that, before the ‘20s, many women make their living as hired laundresses, taking other people’s laundry into their own home. This was often a good job if you also had to stay at home and watch young children. By the 1920s, laundresses are still around, but it’s starting to become more common to take your laundry to a commercial laundromat. Especially in larger cities, where nearly ⅔ of households are sending at least some of their laundry out. At the laundromat, your clothes are sorted and soaked by an employee, then dropped into an early version of the washing machine, which has to be hand cranked, because they don’t have automatic cycles and do not spin dry. Wringing clothes dry is something of a to do. The 1920s does see the advent of a washing machine that has an electrically powered wringer, which eliminates much of the work. This new technology presents enough of a threat to commercial laundromats that they begin offering other services, such as dry cleaning, mending, and ironing. Commercial laundry services will hit their peak in 1929. Three cheers for having someone else do my laundry!

LESS IS MORE?

With all these ads going on about how buying all these appliances will save us time and effort, surely we must all be buying them? Surely our work must be easier than before? Nope! We’re still spending roughly the same hours per week doing housework as our mothers did. Most women are actually spending MORE. Depending on if you live in an urban or rural household, a 1920s housewife is spending anywhere from 45 to 60 hours a week on domestic labor. 

Why have these new technologies failed so spectacularly to ease our burden? Well, the 1920s housewife is doing a lot of chores that, at least for some people in our mother’s day, were done by live-in maids. The other half of the answer to this question is subtler. The physical labor involved in domestic work might have decreased, but the time and mental energy involved actually increased due to the rising expectations these appliances create. Now that we have a vacuum cleaner, our house shouldn’t just be clean: it should be spotless! Now that we have a washing machine, their clothes should be washed every week! With an electric stove, dinner should have at least four courses! The bar has been raised, but the responsibility to meet it falls on just one woman alone.

Impossible, but especially for working-class women. Women’s magazines and home ec experts create these housekeeping and homemaking standards based on middle class women who can afford to stay at home, but they judge all women by them. Working class women have no chance, really… you try spending 60 hours a week on housekeeping when you’re working a full time salaried job. That it seems impossible is precisely the point, from the perspective of advertisers. It means women perpetually feel as though they’re failing at homemaking…but maybe buying a washing machine will make everything alright!

Annoyingly, it isn’t just that women cook and clean to perfection. They also have to do it while appearing cheerful and attractive. A wife can’t do housework in her old clothes: that will depress her husband. No, according to the magazines, a good housewife wears her best clothes and smiles like she’s having the time of her life scrubbing the floors. Now that we are “professional housewives,” women have to make housework appear pleasant. They can never, ever be anything less than happy. Perkiness is part of the job. “No one can afford to let a hasty temper, a sullen mood, and tense feeling ruin the life. The woman who is thus afflicted should not become a wife until she has become master of her disposition and can speak and act calmly under annoying circumstances.” Annoying circumstances… like being told you have to act cheerful about spending 60 hours a week cleaning up?

A HOUSEWIFE’S WORK IS NEVER DONE

So what are we ladies spending 60 hours a week doing? We clean the house, which is far more involved than using some Clorox wipes and running over the floors with the Swiffer. Once a week, women are expected to tidy and organize, dust everything (including the walls and furniture), sweep, vacuum, mop or scrub the floors, clean and polish the china, mirrors, and cabinets, beat the rugs, disinfect and scrub the kitchen and bathrooms, and on and on it goes. Laundry has to be done, of course, as does caring for the children. That and cooking and serving meals is an ever-present chore. Women plan balanced meals, do the grocery shopping, read up on nutrition, and plot the use of leftovers. And because there are refrigerators, hand-mixers, toasters, and new canned and frozen foods available, meals are expected to be more attractive, diverse, and complex than before. 1920s cookbooks suggest four-course meals three times a day, and women’s magazines make it abundantly clear that they should always be served with a smile. 

“Professional” housewives are also responsible for decor and interior design. After all, since they have so much free time now, houses shouldn’t just be tidy: they should be beautiful too! A housewife has to arrange the household in a way that presents her family as cultured, tasteful, successful, respectable, warm, comfortable, and cozy. She’s responsible for making the house feel like a home, and for infusing it with her spirit. One man in favor of mandatory home economics classes lamented, “The home without a woman in it… is cold, unfeeling. Clocks go unwound, draperies had a cold and clammy feeling to their touch. Flowers wither. Books stand primly on their shelves, their characters silent and morose…” God forbid you live in a house without freshly cut flowers, my good sir.

Housewives are also responsible for managing household finances and planning the budget. According to home economics experts, a woman's purchasing decisions dictate her family’s standard of living. It’s up to her to buy the highest quality goods for the lowest prices by doing research, cultivating relationships with her butcher and baker, shopping the sales, and finding creative ways to stretch the budget. Christine Frederick advises housewives to file all receipts alphabetically, make purchasing sheets for meal plans, and even mark your sheets and clothes with the date of purchase so you could keep track of how long they last, which will help you determine if they’re worth a repurchase. She also advises keeping a clothing card listing all family sizes to be carried on shopping trips, and a canned goods storage record to show the prices and quantity of all purchases in your pantry, among other things. Do all women do this? Of course not! Does Christine? Definitely not. 

You might have noticed that this is a lot of work for one woman to do by herself. The key words here being…by herself. Men go off to “work” every day and interact with their colleagues, listen to their bosses, and see their friends. Women stay home to work and spends the majority of their days with no other adults for company. The 1920s housewife is incredibly isolated. The daughters who used to help around the house are now in school from an early age, the servants that would have helped them clean are gone. Even the street vendors who once came to our houses to sell food are being replaced by chain grocery stores. There is also much less of a need for housewives to go outside the home. Going to the laundromat is no longer required, thanks to the washing machine. Going to haul clean water is gone, thanks to running water and indoor plumbing. And going to the sewing circle to make clothing is no longer a thing, as we have ready made clothing and department stores. Technology has made life easier, no question, but it’s  also deprived us of so many regular chances to interact with neighbors and friends. Her home is both her place of work and of rest. And as those of us who’ve just lived through a pandemic can attest to, this isn’t always good for one’s mental state.

CHILDCARE

Besides dealing with impossibly high standards about housekeeping, we also have to do the childcare. The demands and expectations for mothers increase tenfold in the 1920s. There is a veritable explosion of childcare advice from experts, based on the relatively new idea that many parents don’t know how to do it correctly. Previously, parenting was considered a natural act, and children viewed as intrinsically self-sufficient human beings. It’s now believed that, without constant adult attention and active intervention, children will grow up totally dysfunctional. Sound familiar? As one 1920s mother wrote proudly, “I accommodate my entire life to my little girl. She takes three music lessons a week and I practice with her forty minutes a day. I help her with her school work and go to dancing school with her. My mother never stepped inside the school building as far as I can remember, but now there are never 10 days that go by without my either visiting the children’s school or getting in touch with their teacher.”

This change is in part thanks to the relatively new field of child psychology. In the 1920s, American children are one of the most widely studied groups in the world. The famous behavioral psychologist John B. Watson wrote, “At 3 years of age the child’s whole emotional life plan has been laid down, his emotional disposition set. At that age the parents have already determined for him whether he is to grow into a happy person… or one whose every move in life is definitely controlled by fear.” No pressure, moms. 

Is John Watson making you feel anxious about your mothering? Never fear, the U.S. government is here for us! “Do you want your baby to be big and strong and healthy, sound of mind as well as body? Uncle Sam will help you raise just that sort of baby; the kind he wants for future citizens.” The Children’s Bureau publishes a variety of content to help parents, all of it written by their mostly female staff. And by 1929, their Infant Care booklet will be distributed to 50% of American parents of infants. Parent’s Magazine, “on rearing children from crib to college,” is also eager to help. Founded in 1926, it is edited for 30 years by Clara Savage Littledale, a graduate of Smith College and a mother of two. Parent’s Magazine translates child development research into easily digestible bits of practical advice for parents; within a year of its founding, it is selling 100,000 copies a month. There’s big money to be made in parental anxiety. 

What sorts of parenting advice can we expect to find in these magazines, books, and pamphlets? Let’s see… potty training should begin at 3 months, aluminum mittens can prevent thumb sucking, and infants should get cow’s milk from Holstein cows rather than Jerseys or Guernseys for the proper fat percentage. Oh, and also, psychologists discourage you from touching your child. “Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinarily good job of a difficult task.” The newly invented playpen is marketed as a device that allows children to play without parents having to handle them. And after experts start recommending plenty of fresh air to purify the blood of infants, advertisers begin selling something called the “baby cage.” Yes: it’s quite literally a cage that city dwellers can stick out the apartment window so their child can get some outside time. Yikes. 

Ironically, considering the fact that experts are recommending dangling children out the window, child safety becomes a massive concern in the ‘20s. The Spanish Flu, the Polio epidemic, and a better understanding of germ theory makes public health and hygiene a big priority for the government. Public schools begin instructing kids to bathe regularly, brush their teeth twice a day, and wash their hands before meals. Children are also encouraged to tattle on their parents if conditions at home aren’t up to standard. These school campaigns are often sponsored by the same soap companies that’re making mothers feel insecure about the cleanliness of their homes: big surprise. Regular checkups with the pediatrician, a new specialty, becomes the norm, as does actively discouraging kids from leaving their parent’s sight. Why? Because thousands of children are being killed by automobiles. 

We’ll talk more about girls in cars in our next Day in the Life episode. For now, though, let’s just say that driving isn’t very safe in this era, for those in the car or outside it. In 1926, American has a nationally declared No Accident Day. Two child memorial monuments are unveil in New York City for the 7,000 children killed in city traffic accidents that year. Instead of making cities safer for children by changing the behaviors of the adults behind the wheel, though, society decides it’ll be easier to scare the children. Public safety campaigns with gruesome illustrations of accidents say things like, “When a child leaves the curbstone of safety, he enters a lane of death.” Playgrounds spring up in response to these accidents, street games are banned by cities, and parents are encouraged to keep children inside, converting their parlors into playrooms. Most significantly for the mothers amongst us…it’s no longer socially acceptable to ask your kids to run down to the corner store for you, leave older siblings to watch the younger ones whilst you go to the laundromat, or allow your kids to run off and play. No, you are expected to watch your children at all times, and if they get hurt, it’s your fault. 

CONCLUSION

Even though the majority of middle class American women were staying at home in the 1920s rather than joining the men at the office… They were absolutely working. The “professional” housewife of the 1920s was working hard, despite advertisers assuring her that her new electric home products would make her life much easier. All we can hope is that she was finding time to have some fun. Next episode, we’ll hop in our cars and hit the town, exploring 1920s entertainment, doing some dating, and maybe even getting up to some risky business.

women in the workforceKate J. Armstrong1920s