A Lady's Life in 1920s America: A Friday Night

Welcome back to our day - or week, rather - in the life of a 1920s American gal. So far in this series, we’ve gotten dressed, shopped, and done some work and stay-at-home business. I think it’s about time we put on our dancing shoes and headed out to have some fun. Head’s up: this will include a lengthy discussion of dating, and all its amorous consequences, so you might want to preview this one before you share it with any young Exploresses. Now: grab your favorite flask, your handsomest beau, and let’s hop in the automobile: let’s go traveling.

knees out, big problem.

Bill Norton, the bathing beach "cop", uses a tape measure to determine the distance between a woman's knee and the bottom of her bathing suit on a beach in Washington, D.C., in 1922. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

RESEARCH SOURCES

1. Lucy Moore, Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties, New York: Abrams Books, 2010. 

2. Judith Mackrell, Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation, New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2014. 

3. Joshua Zeitz, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity and the Women Who Made America Modern, New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2006. 

4. Charlotte Fiell (Introduction by Emmanuelle Dirix). 1920s Fashion: The Definitive Sourcebook, London: Welbeck, 2021.

5. Lydia Edwards, How to Read a Dress: A Guide to Changing Fashion from the 16th to the 21st Century, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. 

6. Ann Beth Presley, “Fifty Years of Change: Societal Attitudes and Women’s Fashions, 1900-1950,” The Historian 60, no. 2 (Winter, 1998): 307-324. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24451728

7. Ya’ara Notea, “The Mad Flapper: Socialization in Fitzgerald’s ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair,’” The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 16, no. 1 (2018): 18-37. https://doi.org/10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.16.1.0018

8. Megan Brady, “Feminism and Flapperdom: Sexual Liberation, Ownership of Body and Sexuality, & Constructions of Femininity in the Roaring 20’s,” SUNY Oneonta Academic Research (SOAR): A Journal of Undergraduate Social Science, 2019.  http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/1473

ONLINE SOURCES

1. “When Cities Treated Cars Like Dangerous Intruders.” The MIT Press Reader, access December 1 2023. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/when-cities-treated-cars-as-dangerous-intruders/

2. Ellin Mackay, “Why We Go to Cabarets: A Post-Debutante Explains,” The New Yorker, November 20, 1925, accessed 12/20/2022. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1925/11/28/why-we-go-to-cabarets-a-post-debutante-explains

3. “A Timeline of Contraception,” PBS.org, accessed December 1, 2023. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pill-timeline/

4. “Prohibition Sparked a Woman’s Fashion Revolution,” The Mob Museum: Prohibition- An Interactive History, accessed 12/21/2022. https://prohibition.themobmuseum.org/the-history/how-prohibition-changed-american-culture/prohibition-fashion/

5. Jen Doll, “How to Sound Like the Bee’s Knees: A Dictionary of 1920s Slang,” The Atlantic, October 19, 2012, accessed 12/21/2022. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2012/10/how-sound-bees-knees-dictionary-1920s-slang/322320/

6. Jennifer Rosenberg, “What Is the Charleston and Why Was It a Craze?” ThoughtCo., July 27, 2019, accessed January 4, 2023. https://www.thoughtco.com/the-charleston-dance-1779257

7. Emily Spivack, “The History of the Flapper, Part 2: Makeup Makes a Bold Entrance,” Smithsonian Magazine, February 7, 2013, accessed January 4, 2023. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-history-of-the-flapper-part-2-makeup-makes-a-bold-entrance-13098323/

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

For many 1920s ladies, this is an era of financial prosperity. The national wealth is going to double in this decade, and the gross national product will expand by some 40%. More women are working than ever, and Americans in general have more disposable income than they did in our mother’s day. The landscape is changing for the working class: employers are starting to offer fairer working hours and more time off, which means many of us have more free time in which to spend our hard-earned dollars. The rise of a “consumer culture” has us buying more goods, with ad-men encouraging us to prioritize our personal pleasure. But before we can begin to truly taste their delights, we need to talk about one of our most thrilling pastimes: wild rides in fast cars.

GIRLS IN CARS

The first American gasoline-powered automobile was invented back in the 1890s, but it isn’t really until the ‘20s that they become affordable. Henry Ford and his assembly line reduced production costs and lowered prices before World War I, to be sure, but it’s increasing competition from other companies that fueled further innovation. Our cars have bigger engines now, are easier to drive, and have become more reliable. If you’re looking to buy a two-door, closed sedan from Chevrolet in 1927, it will cost you about $594, or about $10,400 today. Which means that TONS of Americans are buying cars now. By the latter half of the decade, the number of cars on the roads is about 26 million; that’s about 1 car for every 5 Americans. For every dishwasher we will purchase in 1929, we will buy 336 automobiles. 

Early models could be unreliable and reckless. Their Tires fall off, they swerve with little coaxing, and when it rains, all bets are off. In 1924, we see some 23,600 car-related deaths, 700,000 injuries, and more than $1 billion in property damage. Many see them as murder machines for unsuspecting pedestrians. In the 19-teens, city streets were seen as a place where men, women, and children could walk freely, around horse-drawn carts and trolley cars. It was a free for all, so cities put in some safety features that would help them share the road. In Kansas City, when they tried marking crosswalks with painted lines, one safety manager reported that female pedestrians ignored them; some even poked at the policemen trying to get passersby to obey them, nudging them aside with their parasols. In the early days of cars, there were few rules for drivers either. The first law regulating speed was put in place in Connecticut in 1901 - 12 miles per hour outside the city, 8 miles per hour inside it. The first traffic light appeared in Detroit back in 1914, though the yellow warning light won’t be added until 1920. But this decades sees the car become a staple of our lives, changing how we move and interact and travel. Concrete roads are being adopted nationwide, and the network of roads across the country is growing rapidly. Our cars don’t yet have seatbelts, so hold onto your hat.

We ladies love our cars. And when companies realize how much influence we have over the purchase of the family automobile, they adjust their sales techniques accordingly. The Fisher Body Corporation’s sales manual goes so far as to tell their staff to “single out the features of your car that have the strongest feminine appeal and explain them to her. If you can convince the woman that your car possesses the qualities which appeal to her most, you will find that you have a very powerful ally in selling the car to the man.” Ads, strategically placed in women’s magazines, speak directly to women as potential drivers, depicting the motorcar as the key to personal pleasure and domestic happiness. One Ford ad boasts, “By owning a Ford car a woman can with ease widen her sphere of interests without extra time or effort. She can accomplish more daily, yet easily keep pace with the usual schedule of domestic pursuits.” Another ad reads, “Wouldn’t you rather be motoring… or doing any one of a hundred things than standing over a hot stove in a hot kitchen?” Why, yes, sir: yes we would!

Automobiles mean freedom. They allow us to get out from under the controlling eyes of our families, to see more of the world and explore it at our leisure. They allow rural women to escape the isolation of the farm, driving into town to do errands, go shopping, and visit friends. They also enable adventurous single gals to go out on dates - gasp! - without a chaperone. Thus the fast-moving 1920s woman is inextricably linked to the automobile. The flapper, as we learned in an earlier episode, is all about “joyriding”. But it also lets her spend some, shall we say, special alone time with her suitors. Car companies use this fact in their marketing, pushing the idea that a flash car brings all the ladies to the yard. In one ad, two women stand in front of a Buick with a caption that reads, “possession makes the heart beat faster.” 

The automobile changes our courtship practices markedly. No longer do we need to visit with our beaus on our family’s front porches or tucked into their parlors. Cars are, essentially, hotels on wheels. “There were two kinds of girls,” one 1920s guy said. “Those who would ride with you in your automobile at night and the nice girls who wouldn’t.” They’re places we can neck and pet like no one’s watching - because no one is. Mostly. This potentially morally compromising situation is something lots of people seem concerned about. As one magazine writer named Eleanor Wembridge writes, “Every evening in the city, ‘gas hawks’ or roving young men in automobiles, pick up the young girls as they come out from work, and ‘pet’ them even in the streets. They have done it outside my window with enthusiasm, which even two large paper bags filled with water and hurled against their windshield by an interested spectator failed to cool.” Jealous, Eleanor? 

So we’re spending plenty of time in cars as passengers. Are we driving, too? Before the war, automobiles were considered “masculine machinery:” cars were too difficult, dangerous, and, well, dirty for a woman to drive. Then the war came, and the Red Cross motor corps women shut that nonsense down real fast. But the notion that women shouldn’t drive persisted into the 1920s. One man observed in a 1925 newspaper, “Women don’t seem to be able to make up their minds about turning a corner until they reach it. They are a bit impulsive in their driving, as in everything else.” Does this refrain sound familiar? A policeman of the era complains, “They’re always looking for a place to park in front of one of the department stores and never think of the road.” One feisty woman claps back in an article in the Boston Globe entitled, “How Good Are Women Drivers?” saying: “I rather pride myself on my driving. It is a constant joy to me, and, surely, anything I do so often and always with such gusto should be done well… And yet, get into a traffic jam at any jam and any place and you will find some man stretching his neck and remarking, “it must be a woman;” If a car zigzags into fantastic patterns on the roadway, “It’s a woman!” If a car stops abruptly, with no signals, “It’s a woman!” Because of course he does. Men just love to accuse women of making the roads less safe. An LA Times article in 1923 even accuses women of using their “feminine wiles” to get out of tickets! “She will calmly break half a dozen traffic rules and then, when the outraged traffic officer stops her, she will look helpless and feminine…And the officer’s intention to give her the razzing of a lifetime will just ooze away under her charming penitence.” Look, we make about half as much as you dok, so I think you owe us one. Just saying. 

Plenty of women hop behind the wheel anyway. As one 1921 article put it, “The number of women who are running automobiles these days is legion.” Famous women such as Edith Warton, Gertrude Stein, and Rose Wilder Lane drive cars, becoming visible symbols of the new, modern, independent woman. And yet, these women, and female drivers in general, are still treated as a bit of a novelty. Society still views women primarily as passengers. But plenty of women prove this assumption wrong. In 1921, Katherine Thaxter and Winifred Hawkridge Dixon decide to drive across the country from Boston to see the great American West. Along the way, they change multiple tires and fix the faulty ignition. As one man in Montana, who offers them the help of his mule team when their car gets stuck in a muddy roadbed, observes, “they ain’t helpless.” Indeed, many women are so determined not to be helpless that they enroll in driving school. The technical director of one YMCA automobile school, H. Clifford Brokaw, writes in 1921, “To learn to drive a car is perhaps usually more difficult for the woman than the man. But having once mastered the preliminary step the normal curiosity of the woman leads her to find out everything she possibly can about the machine.” And they make better students. As one driving lady pupil in 1925 remarked, “Women are easier to teach to drive than men, because they don’t start out thinking they know it all.” And I’ll bet they are more likely to ask for directions.

OUTDOOR SPORT

We 1920s dames love driving our way to some amusement. Often it can be found outside. In the summertime, we love to take road trips. There isn’t any infrastructure in place yet to support large numbers of tourists, so many Americans start “auto-camping,” cooking meals over campfires and sleeping in our tents by the road. We love going to see live sports, like baseball and boxing, and we particularly delight in going swimming. There are plenty of women cooling themselves off in the ocean, which is a change from years past. One man recalls, “Most of us can remember the time when women were not expected to do any real swimming. They dressed for the beach, not for the water. Satin beach slippers were quite the vogue. Such women as ventured into the waves were usually led by a protecting male hand. Today all this has changed. Most girls prefer the role of mermaid to that of beach flower. They dress suitably for real swimming, and they are not afraid of getting wet, or sunburned or even dirty.” I mean, who wants to be a flower when you could be a mermaid, luring sailors to their deaths?

While certain sports are still off limits to girls for being too “rough” or “masculine,” some are considered ladylike enough for us: golf, tennis, and field hockey are all popular. But swimming might be the most popular of all. Lots of doctors recommend it as a way to calm nerves, improve circulation, increase vitality and self-confidence, and get trim. As one ad for swimsuits from the era states, “If you are thin, it will fill you out. If you are stout, it will make you thinner!” 

With the 1920s craze for physical fitness, many gals turn to swimming to keep fit. One of the biggest influences in this sphere is Annette Kellerman. “The Australian Mermaid” first got into swimming because of her rickets, but soon became a champion swimmer in Europe. She created a vaudeville underwater ballet diving show, which she brought to the US in 1907. She was on the cover of Variety by 1908, one of the top paid entertainers in the country by 1914, and went on to star in 14 underwater fantasy type films. One of her great life missions is to teach American women to swim. She wrote, “if more girls would swim and dance and care for athletics, instead of rushing into matrimony as the only joy in the world, there would be fewer divorces.” The Aussies also made the crawl style super popular. Soon it has evolved into an ‘American’ variant, popularized by Hawaiian Olympian Duke Kahanamoku, star of the 1912 and 1920 games. Women weren’t allowed to compete in the Olympics until that latter year. Team USA sent 288 athletes to Antwerp, and only 14 athletes were women; four were swimmers and two were divers. There were only two individual swimming events they could compete in: the 100M Freestyle and the 300M Freestyle, and the whole team competed in the 4*100 Relay. They won Gold for the Freestyle Relay; Ethelda Bleibtrey, 18, won gold for the 100M and 300M Freestyle, three other ladies also won metals, and 14-year-old Aileen Riggin won Gold for diving. Get it, girls!

But of course, we have our naysayers, who have a lot to say about our swimwear. While the 1920s wool one piece might not seem all that scandalous to our modern eyes, at the time, it is considered borderline indecent. It wasn’t very long ago that we ladies had to swan into the ocean in a full length dress. The materials used were so cumbersome that if you actually tried to swim in them, especially in the ocean, there was a serious risk of drowning. But as hemlines have crept up in our land-based wear, swimming costumes start to get smaller. The one-piece wool or knit bathing suit creates something of a stir. Some pools and beaches, resorts, and country clubs even start regulating women’s swimwear. Watch out for the men bearing a tape measure, who might very well try to stop you so he can ascertain how far above the knee your suit goes. Are we surprised by this? Not really. But many ladies aren’t taking this form of body shaming without issue. In 1905, when our favorite Australian Mermaid was told she can’t perform for the British Royal Family because her suit is too tight and reveals too much leg. No worries, she says, casually sewing on some black stockings. She gets in trouble again in Boston in 1908, and is arrested for indecent exposure. But she would rather do that than don something that makes no sense to swim in. “There is no more reason why you should wear those awful water overcoats- those awkward, unnecessary, lumpy “bathing suits” than there is that you should wear lead chains. Heavy bathing suits have caused more deaths by drowning than cramps.” 

ONE FOR THE THRILL SEEKERS

One of the places we like to go swimming is on our nearest beaches. While there, we might just spend an evening taking in thrills at an amusement parks. In the summer, hundreds of thousands of people visit New York’s Coney Island, thanks to the swelling population of Manhattan, an increase of leisure time and spending power, and the creation of the Sea Beach subway line. “Our main advantage at Coney Island is in the size of the crowds,” the owner wrote proudly in 1922. “Often we have half a million people here on a Sunday or a holiday.” They have band pavilions, dance halls, vaudeville theaters, andeven  circus attractions, but the new mechanical amusements are the most exciting ride. There are bumper cars, and something called the High Striker, where young men pay to show off their virility by pounding a small platform and sending a ball up a narrow rail to ring a bell. There is the ferris wheel and the carousel, and of course, the wooden roller coaster: there is even the brand-new Cyclone, opened in 1927, with its 86 foot drop. 

We love places like Coney Island because they are interactive. Unlike at the movies, where you’re mostly watching the action, the amusement park allows you to touch and taste. You can stand with your friends in the Barrel of Fun, a revolving cylinder that tries to roll you off your feet. You can peruse the avenues of “ballyhoo” men and try to win prizes from the skeeball booths. It’s all considered a little seedy by some, but that’s all part of the fun. No surprise, then, that Coney Island is considered a great place for the youth to get some action. Its advertisements play it up as a perfect date night spot for adventurous couples. There are penny arcades with machines to measure the “ardor” of a couple’s kiss, rides like the Canals of Venice and the Tunnel of Love that send their patrons into dark winding passages, and the Cannon Coaster, which shoots people out of a cannon and onto a slide. It asks its male visitors, “Will she throw her arms around your neck and yell?” The Dew Drop is a parachute ride that lifts women’s skirts, much to the delight of onlookers. There’s also the Wedding Ring, which used centrifugal force to cause men and women to grab ahold of each other. Exhibitionism and humor are all part of the attraction, and there’s plenty of romance to be found. As Edward F. Tilyou wrote, “Cupid is always lurking around the corner to take advantage of the general loosening of emotions that accompanies the excitations of an amusement park. Many a visit there has had its climax in a wedding. Every year a considerable number of couples coming to Coney are married before they start home again.” Yes, people are even getting married at Coney Island. But more on courtship in a moment.

KICKING UP OUR HEELS

A lot of these good times are, for some, greased by the social lubricant that is illegal liquor.

We talked at length about alcohol and speakeasies in our coverage of Prohibition, and the anatomy of a 1920s flapper, both of which make great primers for this exploration of our evening play hours. Now, let’s dive into some of the activities we’re enjoying while out and about. Obviously, there are the moving pictures. One of the lovely things about the movies is that they’re pretty accessible. Unlike the cover charges for some of our swankier nightclubs, a ticket for a double feature and a live show costs just 25 cents. We’re going to talk in depth about the movies and their stars in another episode, as well as about jazz singers and club culture. So let’s hone in on that other famously good time: dancing. Social dance parties have been around forever, though most of them were held in ballrooms. These came with a lot of rules, expectations, and restrictions that the 1920s flapper doesn’t love. Men can’t talk or dance with a lady unless they’re properly introduced to her. All conversation is conducted under a matron’s watchful eye. These days, we find such parties too crowded, full of men she’ll be obliged to dance with against her own inclination. We’d rather go to dance halls and cabarets, where we can mix and mingle without parental supervision. We can choose our own partners, or even dance alone or with friends.

“We have privacy in a cabaret,” one flapper wrote. “We go with people whom we find attractive. What does it matter if an unsavory Irish politician is carrying on a dull and noisy flirtation with the little blonde at the table behind us? We don’t have to listen; we are with people whose conversation we find amusing. What does it matter if the flapper and her fattish boyfriend are wriggling beside us as we dance? We like our partner and the flapper likes hers, and we don’t bother each other.”

These spaces, which range from large ballroom affairs to much smaller, less formal dances, are an inexpensive way to cut loose, and they often go on until the wee hours. They are open to women of all sorts of means and situations, set to the wild tunes of the jazz beats sweeping the nation, encourage experimentation and dance forms we’ve never seen before. American ragtime and the pre-war years had brought us new, much looser styles: the Bunny Hug, the Turkey Trot, the Grizzly Bear. The 1920s brings in the Charleston, an athletic style of dance involving a brazen amount of leg. The Black Bottom, the Texas Tomm (which will become the Lindy Hop), and the Shimmy: there isn’t a dance craze we flapper gals aren’t keen to try. Many of them don't require a partner, either, which means we can dance them alone. But dance halls and cabarets also offer opportunities to press close with one’s partner, or several, and explore the body’s curves and planes. Some cities start putting rules in place about what sorts of dancing we’re allowed to indulge in. In Cleveland, at the city’s dance hall, couples are told they must “take either exceptionally long or short steps…don’t dance from the waist up; dance from the waist down. Flirting, spooning, and rowdy conductor any kind is absolutely prohibited.” Yeah, okay…good luck enforcing that.

Dance contests are hugely popular. And in an era excited by the newfangled version of the Olympic Games, world records, and testing the limits of the body, dance marathons are popular too. In 1923, dance instructor Alma Cummings helps kick off the craze in a Manhattan ballroom, wearing holes through both her shoes. “Girl Dances 27 Hours in Ballroom,” an article in the New York Times proclaimed of the evening. “Wins World's Record, Wilting Six Partners.” But the accomplishment is short lived; someone breaks her record just three weeks later. 

There is also a rising phenomenon called the taxi-dance hall. These are places where men can pay to dance with a lady, much like one might rent a cab. For ten cents, a gent can use his 10 cents to buy about 90 seconds with a female dancer.These places serve customers who might struggle to get a dance elsewhere: Newly arrived immigrants, men with disabilities, elderly men. In New York City, there are over 100 taxi-dance halls by the end of the decade, serving up to 50,000 male patrons a week. We ladies are only likely to go to one if we are working. Taxi dance girls are usually unmarried and working-class, and often stigmatized as a kind of prostitute. I can think of far more awful ways to make a crust than with a little social dancing. You know, as long as our partners’ hands don’t stray.

STEPPING OUT WITH A FELLA

Speaking of straying hands, it’s time we talk about courtship. Let’s imagine we’re in the dance hall with our ladies, having ourselves a good old time. By the bar, you see the clutch of gentlemen you came with. They’re the ones who’ve been buying your drinks. And there, looking fine as hell in a 1920s suit, is Tom Hiddleston. He’s my date, though, so you’ll have to find your own. Soon enough, we’ll be out on the dance floor, pressing ourselves against our chosen partner in ways our parents most certainly wouldn’t approve of. Our minds might also be turning to what might happen later, when we find ourselves alone in his car…

A few decades earlier, courtship looked VERY different. It was highly controlled and orchestrated, with chaperoned dances and outings that ensured no one got too frisky. Girls received their beaus on the family’s front porch, all interactions happening under a chaperone’s watchful gaze. That’s not to say that couples couldn’t find a way to be alone: as we learned in season 1’s episode on sex in the Civil War era, we know they certainly got up to some risky business. 

But with cars - or, as some call it, the “devil’s wagon” - and more chances at work and disposable income, comes a new kind of freedom for single women. It’s much easier to get out from under our parents than it ever was before. As one social commentator writes, “The average father does not know, by name or sight, the young man who visits his daughter and who takes her out to places of amusement.” This deeply bothers a dad in Muncie, Indiana, who warns his daughter about “going out motoring for the evening with a young blade in a rakish car waiting at the curb.” “What on earth do you want me to do?” she responds. “Just sit around home all evening!”

We 1920s gals aren’t just courting, like our mothers did. Now we’re dating. The term “date” first appeared in 1896 in a Chicago newspaper, but it was more a fad then than a prevalent system. By the 1920s, though, it’s firmly settled in. Whereas the girls in the Victorian era were often closely watched, without much chance to spend alone time with a suitor before marriage, we 1920s gals are mixing and mingling with eligible bachelors like Tom way more frequently. Especially if we’ve moved to the city, which provides both a new kind of anonymity and a whole lot of avenues for fun. And why shouldn’t we enjoy ourselves? After all, more of us are working than ever. And if we don’t have to hand that money over to our families, we have more control over what we spend our hard-earned dollars on. “In those cities where women 25 to 35 can control their own purse strings,” one contemporary writes, “many of them are apt to drift into casual or steady relationship with certain men friends which may or may not end in matrimony.” If the First World War taught us anything, it’s that perhaps it’s better to find Mr. Great For Right Now rather than saving all our amorous fun for Mr. Right. The courtship system has changed drastically by 1920, and our sexual behavior is evolving with it. Surveys tell us that while only 14 percent of women born before 1900 got jiggy with a partner before marriage, some 36 to 39 percent in the 1910s and 20s did. Apparently we 1920s dame are also twice as likely to experience an orgasm in these encounters than our mothers. 

Nowhere is this change more evident than on college campuses. With dating entering the college scene, the old rules of conduct start to relax. The ladies are allowed to spend evenings alone with men, and she can date a series of them without a lot of social censure. She might go to a party and indulge in some “petting,” a new term that encompasses everything from a little light touching to…well, everything short of full-on babymaking. “Smoking, dancing like Voodoo devotees, dressing décolleté, ‘petting’ and drinking,” an Ohio State gushes. “We do these things because we honestly enjoy the attendant physical sensations.… The girl with sport in her blood … ‘gets by.’ She kisses the boys, she smokes with them, drinks with them, and why? Because the feeling of comradeship is running rampant.” 

Whereas before, being caught doing anything physical with a suitor might have meant being seen as “ruined” in the eyes of society, these women get to try before they buy. About half of all college-educated ladies will lose their virginity before they marry - although it must be said that most do so with the men they’ll go on to marry. And men are growing more relaxed about how much sexual experience a lady brings into the marriage bed. Surveys show that about 3/4ths of college-age men say they don’t mind marrying a lady who’s explored some heavy petting.

Social commentators are, of course, concerned by what they see as the youth’s relaxing morals. They call it “Sex o’clock in America,” and sigh that America’s single have sex too firmly on the brain. “ ‘To Spoon’ or ‘Not to Spoon’ Seems to Be the Burning Question with Modern Young America,” one man writes with dismay. Like it or not, dating gives 1920s gals a chance to get to know our suitors before deciding whether they will make good lifelong partners. But in other ways, it actually limits our options. Especially for women who’d rather date each other. In the Victorian era, men and women often lived in different spheres, hardly mingling socially. There were many female-only spaces, which helps engender deeps bonds of affection. Sometimes, of course, those bonds were romantic. Society was happy for women to hug, kiss, and be affectionate with each other, even if it didn’t exactly condone sexual congress. Some half of college educated women from the 1870s to the 1920s refused to marry at all. This is surely for a lot of reasons, but some of them have to be because they preferred women. It was considered perfectly acceptable for two married women to live together in what was sometimes called a “Boston Marriage,” though such a union had no real legal standing. Settlement house founder Jane Addams spends her life with partner Mary Rozet Smith. Victorian-era actress Charlotte Cushman rather famously took female lovers, though she always referred to them as “friends.” It wasn’t until the turn of the century that we started getting obsessed with categorizing sexuality and passing supposedly scientific judgment on it. So while we 1920s gals may have more freedom to scuttle off with Tom Hiddleston into a corner, but good luck sneaking away with Kristen Stewart without risking social censure. Social scientists of our era have started to see female homosexuality - and the notion of women who don’t need men - as a problem.

And even for those of us who are happy to date men, dating isn’t all fun. It can put us in a precarious situation: one that can easily end in disaster.

IS IT REALLY A TREAT? DATING IN THE 1920s

An important thing to remember, when it comes to going out in 1920s America, is that it almost always costs money. And while more single and married women are working than ever, we aren’t making nearly as much as our male counterparts. The money we do make, we often have to hand over to our families, if we live with them. While our brothers get to keep at least half of their paycheck, daughters are expected to hand it all over for the family’s greater good. But even for those of us who live alone, our paychecks are barely covering rent and food, let alone amusement. Female factory workers in 1920s Chicago earned around $22 a week, while their minimum living costs were $20 to $25. That’s some pretty anxiety-inducing math.

Enter the whole concept of “treating.” The idea here is that a man who takes a lady out on a date will pay for everything, treating his lady to a night on the town. For some women, this is the only way they can enjoy such delights on a weekend. As cheap as movies and a trip to Coney Island might be, they’re still out of reach for many of us. “If they didn’t take me,” one department store clerk says of her boyfriends, “how could I ever go out?” Another waitress puts it more bluntly: “If I did not have a man, I could not get along on my wages.” It tells you something that girls who frequently go out with boys who treat them are referred to as “charity girls.”
Some men complain about this system. They say treating is an outsized burden on their wallets, and can limit them socially and romantically. A Chicago Tribune publishes an article in 1919 entitled “MAN GETTING $18 A WEEK DARES NOT FALL IN LOVE.” But at least it gives them control. The dangers here is far greater for women, because “treating” comes with certain strings attached. If men are going to pay for a lady’s evening, they go in with certain amorous expectations. They might demand a kiss, or a pet, or even more than that. This barter becomes part of the romantic exchange. When a young working girl in New York expresses confusion to her friend about why she can’t seem to keep a boyfriend, the friend replies, “Don’t you know there ain’t no feller goin’t spend coin on yer for nothing?”

Tom is a gentleman, obviously. He just wants to read me poetry and hang on my every fascinating word. But for us 1920s gals, these seeming late night freedoms have a dark side; wage inequality means we’re bound to find ourselves under pressure to do things with our paramours we might not want to. And if we do ‘go the limit’, we might end up in some pretty hot water.

BIRTH CONTROL

When birth control vigilantes like Margaret Sanger came on the scene in the 1910s, it was considered a radical movement: one spearheaded by women. Their focus was on putting control of reproduction into the hands of those whom it affected most: women. Mostly married women. In excerpts from letters Margaret Sanger received from these women, we can see why they were seeking help: “I am only twenty-six years old and the mother of five children,” one wrote. “The last time I had a six month’s miscarriage and I have been weak ever since…I have to work so hard until I feel like it would kill me to give birth to another.” “I don’t care to bear any more children for the man I got,” another letter reads. “He is most all the time drunk and not working and gone for days and nights and leave me alone most of the time.” 

In 1914, in her journal The Woman Rebel, Sanger suggested that perhaps there are times when one should actively avoid getting pregnant, like in illness or poverty. She didn’t say anything about how to keep from getting pregnant, and yet the New York City postmaster banned the journal because, under the Comstock Law, it supposedly counted as "obscene, lewd, and lascivious." Later that year, Sanger coined the term “birth control,” causing such a stir she had to flee the country. But the 1920s sees this movement transformed into a respectable, even nonradical cause. Surely a good thing! Except that it’s been taken over by mostly male doctors who make birth control a medical, rather than a feminist, issue. And because of the era’s interest in eugenics, we see of them using birth control to fuel racist ideas about controlling America’s black population and keeping them from reproducing. At least birth control is easier to access than it was in our mama’s day. 

So what sorts of contraception are we using? Likely either a condom or a diaphragm. Charles Goodyear invented the vulcanization of rubber way back in 1839, and it wasn’t long before manufacturers were making rubber condoms. They were also making douching syringes, diaphragms, and ‘womb veils,' a rather whimsical name for what is similar to an IUD. Pharmacies sold all sorts of suppositories that proclaimed they would keep us from getting pregnant. But Anthony Comstock, the anti-vice activist, saw all of these items as a worrying means of separating sex from marriage. In 1873, he successfully lobbied Congress for a bill called the Comstock Act, which outlawed the distribution of any “obscene materials.” That includes anything having to do with contraception, which can’t be sold across state lines or through the mail. Until the 1890s, most of the states either banned or radically limited contraception. An underground contraceptives trade sprung up around these rules, run mostly by women and immigrants, some of whom made a killing on the birth control trade. At last, things changed in 1918, when war started making everyone nervous about the spread of venereal disease. In a case brought to Judge Frederick Crane’s New York appeals court, he ruled that contraceptive devices were legal as instruments for the maintenance of the public’s health. Suddenly, there was no more need for euphemisms and under-the-counter dealing. Condoms could be found in drugstores, barbershops, newsstands, and gas stations. But here’s the thing: this sudden condom boom helped men keep from getting anyone pregnant, but we ladies don’t really have an equivalent. The issue with diaphragms, our most effective method, is that we need to see a doctor to get one, which can be expensive and embarrassing. They might not even work. Lois Long, journalist and devoted flapper gal, once wrote: “We wore wishbone diaphragms that weren’t always reliable…There was a doctor who handled abortions for our crowd. She would take a vacation at Christmastime to rest up for the rush after New Year’s Eve.”

Middle-class women have an easier time getting ahold of contraceptives than working-class ones: they can ask their private physicians. Poorer women have to turn to clinics. In 1921, Margaret Sanger establishes the American Birth Control League, the antecedent of the Planned Parent Federation of America. Two years later, she opens the country’s first legal birth control clinic. Part of her mission, she says, is to “elevate sex into another sphere, whereby it may subserve and enhance the possibility of individual and human expression.” For her, it’s also about our liberation. And while there are those who see clinics as threatening, the law tends to support them. In Chicago in 1924, a judge rules that the health commissioner can’t deny a license to a clinic on moral grounds, because doing so was essentially blending church and state. By 1930, there will be fifty-five birth control clinics in 23 cities across 12 states. Hey, 2023: you listening?

The 1920s also sees some breakthroughs in our understanding of fertility. In the Victorian era, most doctors and manuals suggested that a woman’s most fertile time was around her period: so, exactly the opposite of accurate. In the 1920s, scientists in Japan and Austria figure out that women are fertile about halfway through the average menstrual cycle, leading to the introduction of the "Rhythm Method."

As for abortions, your going to have trouble finding a safe option. By 1910, they were totally illegal in every state, except in absolute medical emergency. A decision mostly made by male doctors. Abortions are driven underground, which means a rise in unsafe conditions for the women who seek them. In 1930, the Guttmacher Institute says that about 2,700 women will die from them - that’s almost one in every five maternal deaths recorded for the year.

PUTTING A RING ON IT

Despite the increasing availability of birth control and the era’s new focus on sexuality, marriage is, for most of us, still the end goal. If I’m going to “go the limit” with Tom Hiddleston, I won’t likely do it until there’s a shiny ring involved.It’s totally fine to be a flapper and have some wild times, but eventually many are still keen to settle down, and walk down the aisle, on average, around the age of 21. At least, that’s what society expects of her. But now, it’s time to drive off into the night with our cuddle cutie, relishing the feeling of the wind in our hair. Until next time.