what contributed to the new freedoms women enjoyed in the 1920s? select the two correct answers.

The 1920s heralded a dramatic break between America's past and future. Before World War I the land remained culturally and psychologically rooted in the nineteenth century, but in the 1920s America seemed to interruption its wistful attachments to the recent past and usher in a more modern era. The most vivid impressions of that era are flappers and trip the light fantastic halls, movie palaces and radio empires, and Prohibition and speakeasies. Scientists shattered the boundaries of space and time, aviators made men fly, and women went to work. The state was confident—and rich. But the 1920s were an age of extreme contradiction. The unmatched prosperity and cultural advancement was accompanied past intense social unrest and reaction. The same decade that diameter witness to urbanism and modernism besides introduced the Ku Klux Klan, Prohibition, nativism, and religious fundamentalism. America stood at a crossroads betwixt innovation and tradition. Many Americans were looking boldly ahead, simply but equally many were gazing astern, to cherished memories of a fabulous national innocence.

Age of Convergence

Many of the trends that converged to make the twenties distinct had been building for years, and in some cases, decades.

We think of the twenties every bit an era of liberation for women. Indeed, the decade gave ascension to the flapper, described past Webster's Collegiate Dictionary as "a young girl, esp. 1 somewhat daring in conduct, spoken language and dress," immortalized in the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald and by silent pic stars like Clara Bow, Colleen Moore, and Louise Brooks. But women had been breaking down the separate spheres of Victorian civilisation for quite some time. A powerful women's political motility demanded and won the right to vote in 1920. Spurred on by the growth of an urban, industrial economic system that required a larger female person labor force, and by the emergence of public amusements that defied the old nineteenth-century courting system, many young women at present had the wherewithal and drive to lead independent lives. Past the dawn of the decade, anywhere betwixt one-quarter and one-tertiary of urban woman workers lived alone in individual apartments or boardinghouses, free from the watchful eyes of their parents, and equally early as 1896, newspaper columnist George Ade used the term "engagement" to describe a new convention by which boys and girls paired off to frolic at dance halls, amusement parks, and other public spaces, gratuitous from adult supervision.

Closely associated with the rise of the flapper, the twenties gave rise to a frank, national discussion about sexual activity. Simply this trend, too, had been building over time. Every bit early every bit 1913, the Atlantic Monthly appear that the clock had tolled "Sex o'clock in America," indicating a "Repeal of Reticence" virtually problems that had in one case been considered taboo. To be certain, these trends accelerated afterward World War I: surveys propose that 14 per centum of women born before 1900 engaged in pre-marital sex by the age of 25, while as many as 39 percent of women who came of age in the 1910s and 1920s lost their virginity before wedlock. Simply the cardinal structural changes that were at play in earlier decades—namely, urbanization and industrialization—long predated the twenties. Between 1800 and 1920 the number of children borne by the average American woman brutal from seven to iii. Americans were not necessarily having less sexual activity. Rather, in an urbanizing society, where more children were a cost rather than an nugget, they stepped up their use of birth control, and in and then doing, redefined sexual activity as something to engage in for pleasance rather than procreation.

We think of the twenties as an era of prosperity, and in many respects, Americans had never lived so well. But this trend, too, claimed before roots. Equally factories and shops mechanized, the piece of work week of the urban blueish-collar worker fell from 55.9 hours in 1900 to 44.2 in 1929, while his or her real wages rose by 25 percent. Past the dawn of the twenties, Americans had more time and money to spend on new kinds of public amusements like dance halls, movie theaters, fun parks, and baseball game stadiums. They also had more opportunities to purchase competitively priced durable items, thanks to new methods of production and distribution. The prosperity of the post-war period greatly accelerated this trend. Past 1929, American families spent over twenty percent of their household earnings on such items equally phonographs, mill-made article of furniture, radios, electric appliances, automobiles, and "amusement." What people couldn't beget, they borrowed. By the mid-'20s Americans bought over 3-quarters of all furniture, phonographs, and washing machines on credit.

The proliferation of advert—alongside the maturation of the publishing, music, and film industries—exposed citizens to a new gospel of fun that was intimately associated with the purchase of goods and services. "Sell them their dreams," a prominent advert-homo intoned. "Sell them what they longed for and hoped for and almost despaired of having. Sell them hats by splashing sunlight across them. Sell them dreams—dreams of country clubs and proms and visions of what might happen if only. After all, people don't buy things to have them. . . . They buy promise—hope of what your merchandise might do for them."[ane]

Age of Wonders

If many of the social trends that we acquaintance with the twenties had long been building, the decade was indeed unique in many means.

It was a decade of firsts. For the start time ever, more Americans (51 percent) lived in cities than in villages or on farms.

It was a decade of economic expansion. Between 1919 and 1929 horsepower per wage earner in manufacturing skyrocketed by l percent, signaling a robust wave of mechanization that increased productivity by 72 percent in manufacturing, 33 pct in railroads, and 41 percent in mining.

And information technology was a decade of technological wonder.

In 1912, simply sixteen percentage of American households had electricity; by the mid-20s, almost two-thirds did. Overnight, the electric vacuum cleaner, the electric refrigerator and freezer, and the automatic washing motorcar became staples in heart-grade homes.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, automobiles were nonetheless unreliable and scarce, just in the years just prior to World War I, pioneers like Ransom Olds, Henry Leland, and Henry Ford revolutionized design and production methods to brand the car affordable and trustworthy. When the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd interviewed loftier schoolhouse students in Muncie, Indiana, in the mid-20s, they plant that the virtually common sources of disagreement betwixt teenagers and their parents were 1) "the number of times you become out on school nights during the week"; two) "the hour you arrive at night"; 3) "grades at school"; iv) "your spending money"; and 5) "use of the machine."[2]

Some other pre-war technology that came of age in the twenties was film. By the mid-1920s movie theaters were selling 50 meg tickets each week, a sum equal to roughly one-half the US population! And the generation that came of historic period in the twenties learned things at the picture palace that they couldn't learn in schoolhouse. "The but do good I ever got from the movies was in learning to love and the knowledge of sexual practice," a young woman confided to an interviewer in the mid-20s. "If we didn't meet such examples in the movies," explain another, "where would we get the idea of being 'hot?' Nosotros wouldn't."[3] These young informants might accept been thinking of the 1923 blockbuster Flaming Youth, which one reviewer described as "intriguingly risqué, but non necessarily offensively so. The flapperism of today, with its jazz. . . . and its utter disregard of the conventions, is daringly handled in this film. And it contains a bathing scene in silhouette that must have made the censors blink."[4]

Like moving picture, radio was invented in the tardily nineteenth century merely experienced its formative era of commercial expansion in the twenties. On November 2, 1920, radio station KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, broadcast the presidential election returns. Information technology was the showtime-e'er live radio transmission for a pop audience, and although few Americans that evening had the necessary technology to hear the results, by 1922 more than than three million households had acquired radio sets. Seven years later more than twelve million households owned radios, fuelling an manufacture that saw $852 million in almanac sales.

Americans living in the 1920s could listen to Roxy and His Gang, the Clicqot Club Eskimos, and the Ipana Troubadours. They could hear Gartland Rice announce the Earth Series—live—or listen to Floyd Gibbons relate the day's news. Radio proved a highly democratic medium, and by mid-decade local stations helped bring "race music," "hillbilly" sounds, and ethnic recordings into living rooms across the country. In the late 1920s enterprising American businessmen built powerful "10-stations" only across the border in northern United mexican states to evade federal radio frequency regulations. From this vantage point they were able to beam the music of "Fiddlin' John Carson," the Carter Family unit, and Jimmie Rodgers to every destination from California to New York City.

Return to Normalcy

Since the dawn of the twentieth century, American politics had been dominated by Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, two presidents whose outsized personalities and dueling visions of the progressive spirit defined the tenor and tone of public life. Later on 1920, Americans seemed to aspire to "normalcy." In Warren G. Harding, they got exactly what they bargained (and voted) for.

Harding's best qualities were his extreme affability and hit good looks. Both got him in trouble regularly. Even every bit a young boy, the future president seemed all too inclined to delight everyone and offend no one. As a successful newspaper publisher, local politician and, later, U.s.a. senator from Ohio, Harding joined the Rotary Club, the Elks, the Odd Fellows, the Hoo Hoos, the Red Men, and the Moose. He relished poker games and excelled at public speaking. He played the b-flat trumpet in the town marching band. Indeed, Warren Harding was the very embodiment of Sinclair Lewis's Babbit—and proud to exist so.

The ever-genial Harding stacked his Cabinet with cronies from Ohio. He let his attorney general sell pardons and pledges of government non-interference to the highest bidders. He looked the other style while his secretary of the interior accepted almost $400,000 in kickbacks in substitution for a long-term lease on oil-rich federal lands at Teapot Dome, Wyoming. All the while, he adhered to a limited and conservative vision of government, pressing for lower taxes and less regulation and issuing an implicit repudiation of Wilsonian reformism.

Despite—or perhaps fifty-fifty because of—his limitations, Warren Harding was widely admired by the American electorate. When he died halfway through his term, the public offered up a not bad outpouring of sorrow and sympathy. It was just in the following months that Warren Harding's countrymen learned of their late president's extramarital affairs and scandal-ridden assistants. But by so, it inappreciably seemed to matter. Everything was back to normal.

Silent Cal

Harding's successor, Calvin Coolidge, may have been the about reticent human ever to occupy the White House. Ascetic, laconic, and bourgeois to a mistake, "Silent Cal" perfectly embodied the laissez-faire ethic that governed American politics throughout the "Jazz Historic period." He slept eleven hours each twenty-four hour period, vetoed far more bills than he proposed, and claimed that his only hobby was "holding public office." He had little to say. When a constituent bet that she could "go more than 2 words" out of him, the President replied simply: "Yous lose." Upon hearing that Coolidge had passed abroad in 1933, the famous wit Dorothy Parker asked: "How could they tell?"

Coolidge slashed the federal budget past well-nigh half, eliminated the gift tax, sliced the manor revenue enhancement past 50 percent, and lowered the maximum federal surtax from 60 percent to 20 percentage. The president disavowed annihilation beyond minimal regulation of business concern and commerce. He denied a federal role in labor relations and repeatedly affirmed his accented faith in market forces. What was "of real importance to wage-earners," he claimed, "was non how they might quarrel with their employers but how the business of the country might so be organized as to insure steady employment at a fair rate of pay."[5]

In 1928 Coolidge announced unexpectedly and without fanfare that he did "not choose to run for president" once again. His married woman was equally surprised equally anyone. "Isn't that just similar the homo!" she exclaimed. "I had no thought."

The Engineer

When Herbert Hoover took the oath of office as the nation'southward 30-beginning president in 1929, the New York Times sounded an enthusiastic note of blessing, applauding the new primary executive for his "versatile ability," "sterling character," and "Progressive leanings."

Orphaned at the tender historic period of nine, Hoover was raised by austere Quaker relatives in Iowa. He worked his way through Stanford University, where he earned a degree in engineering and graduated first in his class. Over the next twenty years he ascended steadily up the corporate ladder, carving out a brilliant career as a mine operator, engineer, and businessman. During Globe State of war I he served as US food administrator and masterminded voluntary production and consumption standards that kept the American Expeditionary Force well nourished and domestic prices steady. Afterwards the war he headed up the American relief effort in Belgium, where he was widely credited with feeding and clothing several hundred grand European refugees. Afterwards saving Belgium, Hoover served as secretary of commerce under Warren K. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. In that part he profoundly expanded the authorities's collection and broadcasting of industrial data, organized dozens of voluntary corporate councils, and brought the executive branch into close cooperation with business and labor.

Information technology was Herbert Hoover'southward swell misfortune that the Depression began only months into his term in office. Smart, well educated, well traveled, and enormously capable, Hoover considered himself an activist and a Quaker humanitarian. As an engineer, he embodied the guiding spirit of progressivism, with its faith in rational and informed public policy. The poverty and despair of his countrymen profoundly affected Hoover.

Merely like most public men of his era, Herbert Hoover believed that sound volunteerism was the best remedy for economic distress. Rather than adopt strong federal regulatory and fiscal measures, he called for more studies and for an organized—but voluntary—response on the part of the private sector.

By 1930, this blueprint of inaction made Herbert Hoover one of the most despised men in America. A pop Vaudeville skit had the straight-man announce that the Depression was over. "Has Herbert Hoover died?" his sidekick would inquire. In public appearances, the president seemed thoroughly defeated. "A rose would wilt in his mitt," one observer famously remarked.

Culture Wars

The great revolution in morals, aesthetics, and everyday life that was sweeping through America didn't meet with uniform approval. Though the twenties are remembered primarily equally a decade of bold innovation and experimentation, they also witnessed a fierce counter-revolutionary trend.

In 1925 a group of local boosters in Dayton, Tennessee, persuaded a young high schoolhouse science teacher, John Scopes, to violate the state's anti-evolution police. They merely wanted to describe attending to their economically depressed crossroads town. Instead, what followed was a sensational trial that pitted the famous "lawyer for the damned" Clarence Darrow, a committed civil libertarian and about fanatical atheist, against William Jennings Bryan, the famously eloquent Nebraskan who had thrice failed to attain the presidency but who remained a hero to rural fundamentalists in the S and Midwest. The trial's climax came when Darrow called his adversary to the stand up every bit a biblical skillful and Bryan reluctantly admitted that some scriptural language might exist more allegorical than literal.

The trial seemed like the culmination of a long-simmering clash betwixt liberal and fundamentalist Christians. Although information technology was technically a win for the prosecution, liberals declared it a great victory for their cause. Bryan, they said, had unintentionally exposed fundamentalism as a simpleton's creed, while Darrow had established the supremacy of scientific discipline over fundamentalist Christianity. In fact, the conservatives were far from beat. They immediately began to regroup and charter missions, publishing houses, and radio stations. L years subsequently, they would reemerge as a powerful force in American public life.

More successful in the immediate term was the Ku Klux Klan, a Reconstruction-era paramilitary group that had faded from American life until 1915, when Colonel William Simmons re-founded the organisation at a small ceremony on Stone Mountain, in Georgia. By 1925 the organization claimed at to the lowest degree five million members and controlled politics in Indiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado; information technology was enormously powerful in several other states, notably California and Georgia. The Klan's greatest legislative achievement came in 1924, when it joined a wide coalition of conservative groups that won passage and approval of a callous anti-immigration statute. The gold door would remain closed for another 40 years.

The new Klan represented diverse ideas to its polyglot membership. It was avowedly white supremacist, only for proficient mensurate it besides included Jews, Catholics, Asians, and "new women" amid its list of enemies. Its followers could be found in cities as well as in the countryside, but as a general rule, the organisation was fundamentalist and conservative in both profile and disposition. Every bit one sympathetic observer explained, "The Ku Klux movement seems to be some other expression of the general unrest and dissatisfaction with both local and national weather—the high price of living, social injustice and inequality, poor assistants of justice, political abuse, hyphenism, disunity, unassimilated and conflicting thought and standards—which are distressing all thoughtful men."[6]

In 1924, the organization enjoyed sufficient strength to force a deadlock at the Democratic National Convention, where supporters of New York's governor, Al Smith—a Catholic—faced off against Klansmen aligned with erstwhile Treasury Secretary William McAdoo. While Smith's supporters shouted "Ku Klux McAdoo!"—to which McAdoo supporters taunted their opponents with cries of "Booze! Booze! Alcohol!"—the convention came to a deadlock. On the 103rd ballot, exasperated, and desperate, the convention agreed on a compromise candidate, a lackluster federal judge named John W. Davis, who was resoundingly defeated past the incumbent, Calvin Coolidge. It was the high-water marker for the Klan.

Arguably, Prohibition was the most successful achievement of anti-modern forces in the 1920s. Writing just later on Congress and states ratified the Eighteenth Amendment, which authorized a ban on the production and auction of alcoholic beverages, the cracking urban wit H. L. Mencken attributed such "crazy enactments" to "the yokel'southward built and incurable hatred of the city human being—his simian rage confronting anybody who, as he sees information technology, is having a ameliorate time than he is." In his shrill, visceral response to Prohibition, Mencken may have overstated the intensity of America's rural-urban separate. Over the next decade there would exist no shortage of bathtub gin and woodshed stills in the countryside. Yet he was right on ane count: passage of the Eighteenth Subpoena and its accompanying federal statute, the Volstead Act, both of which took effect in 1920, were the culminating events in a long effort by conservative forces to cheque the growing power of America's immigrants and urban dwellers—1 and the same, in some respects, since commencement- and second-generation Americans comprised the overwhelming (75+ per centum) part of the population in metropolises like New York, Chicago, and Boston. Though Americans widely flouted the new police force (and, appropriately, the twenties are remembered as a particularly liquid era), in fact, per capita alcohol consumption plummeted during Prohibition, lending the decade yet some other paradoxical trait.

Cease of an Era

The twenties were always something of a gilded age. Fifty-fifty amidst the groovy prosperity and excess of the decade, America'due south economy was fundamentally weak. Over xl per centum of Americans got by on less than $ane,500 each year, which economists cited as the minimum family subsistence level. The income of the pinnacle 0.1 percent of families equaled the income of the lesser 42 percent. Most country folk did not experience the prosperity of the Roaring Twenties. Subcontract prices hit rock bottom in the aftermath of World State of war I and widened the gulf between America's (relatively) prosperous cities and impoverished farms.

Such glaring inequality had consequences. Smash times relied on mass consumption, and eventually, working people reached their limit. The very wealthy could only buy so many cars, washing machines, radio sets, and movie tickets. When consumer demand bottomed out, America's economy just stopped performance.

When the stock market collapsed in 1929, and when the twin influences of under-consumption and over-speculation began wreaking structural havoc on the American economy, the nation's revolution in values and aesthetics remained incomplete. The twenties were arguably the nation'due south first modern decade, but many of its social and cultural revolutions would play themselves out in time to come years.

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[1] William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Ability and the Rise of a New American Civilisation (New York, 1993), 298.

[two] Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Written report in Modernistic American Culture (New York, 1929), 257, 524.

[3] Garth S. Jowett, Ian C. Jarvie, and Katherine H. Fuller, eds., Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 276.

[4] Joshua Zeitz, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sexual activity, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern (New York: Crown, 2006), 211.

[5]  William East. Leuchtenberg, The Perils of Prosperity: 1914-1932 (New York, 1958, rev. 1993), 97.

[6] Lynn Dumenil. Modern Atmosphere: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York, 1995), 235.

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Joshua Zeitz has taught American history at Harvard University and Cambridge University. He is the author of Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity and the Women Who Made American Modern (2006) and White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Post-War Politics ( 2007). He is currently writing a joint biography of John Hay and John Nicolay.

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Source: https://ap.gilderlehrman.org/essays/roaring-twenties

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