1919 Carrie Chapman Catt
- National League of Women Voters;
Women one-third of votes
1920 presidential campaign.
18,000 new mothers dying
each year,
200,000 babies dying
before age one;
1921 Sheppard-Towner Act
-
First federally-funded
health care act,
$1.25 million prenatal
clinics & public health centers;
American Medical
Association: “socialistic scheme”;
1929 Congress cut off
funding;
1920s women GOP &
Democratic party conventions (10% total delegates);
Edith Rogers widow of
incumbent; re-elected 1926-1958;
Women governors Wyoming
& TX, also succeeded husbands;
1921 National
Women’s Party - Alice Paul;
number of states refused
to let women sign contracts, serve on juries, serve as public officials, hold
certain jobs or work under certain conditions;
1923 Equal Rights
Amendment, “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the
US…”
philosophical
disagreement;
1920s letdown in
women’s activism, loss of momentum;
1953: “It was fun
to go back and review the fight… It was maddening to think that we
somehow didn’t carry on as vigorously as we could have done. It was puzzling to wonder why. Did the
League of Women Voters turn us away from fighting to studying? We should have
gone on… if only you and I were young and strong.”
Younger generation,
“We’re not out to benefit society… we’re out for our
individual careers and desires.”
birth control -
1800s condoms,
diaphragms, sponges;
1870s women's rights
movement - "voluntary motherhood";
doctors warn that birth
control may cause physical injury, unnatural, encourage prostitution &
spread venereal disease, threaten family life.
1860s-1870s –
passage of state laws making most abortions illegal;
1873 Comstock law:
"Act for the Suppression of Trade in and Circulation of Obscene Literature
and Articles of Immoral Use"
Anthony Comstock - head
New York Society for the Suppression of Vice;
“Whoever shall sell, lend, give away,
publish, or have in his possession any obscene book, pamphlet, advertisement,
or any medicine or any article whatsoever for the prevention of conception or
for causing unlawful abortion… shall be imprisoned at hard labor…
not less than six months… or fined not less than $100.”
Emma Goldman,
"Woman's freedom & independence must come from refusing to bear
children unless she wants them.”
1919 Goldman
deported;
Margaret Sanger
(1883-1966);
mother had 11 children
& several miscarriages, dying age 49.
Sanger nursing work on
New York's Lower East Side;
1912 "What Every
Girl Should Know"
censorship –
headline: "What Every Girl Should Know - Nothing, by Order of the US Post
Office."
1914 The Woman
Rebel:
"I believe that
woman is enslaved by sex conventions, by motherhood, by middle-class
morality."
pamphlet Family
Limitation -
"Birth control must
not be set back by the false cry of obscenity. Women must learn to know their own bodies."
100,000 copies;
"Thousands of women
bearing 12 to 16 children request me to send them this pamphlet. 300,000 mothers lose their babies every
year from poverty and neglect. Are
the old archaic laws to be respected above womanhood? The women of America answer, no!"
national speaking
tour;
1916 Brooklyn clinic
– almost 500 women in 9 days;
1921 American Birth
Control League:
network of 300
clinics;
1920s majority
middle-class married women used some form of
contraceptives;
ABCL 37,000 members;
Katherine
Hepburn;
Eleanor Roosevelt favors
"planned families"
Sears Roebuck catalog -
"preventives";
1942 Planned Parenthood
Association;
1920s changing attitudes
toward sex;
“companionate
marriage”;
the “new
woman” - “The Vanishing Lady”;
World War I –
experiences in work, adventure;
Automobile - new
mobility;
Radio – 1920s
“Jazz Age” – Charleston, fox trot, bunny hug;
Movies showed new
behavior;
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This
Side of Paradise (1920) – young girl: "I've kissed dozens of men, I suppose
I'll kiss dozens more."
Age of the
“flapper”;
New York Times 1920 -
women's skirt hems nine inches off ground, "far beyond any modest
limitation";
president Univ. Florida,
"Low-cut gowns, the rolled hose and short skirts are born of the devil and
are carrying the present and future generations to destruction."
Utah bill – fines
or prison for women with skirts more than three inches above ankle;
binding breasts –
slim boyish ideal;
cosmetics
industry;
1921 Miss America
pageant;
women bobbing
hair;
Wright brothers first
flight 1903;
First American woman
licenced pilot - Harriet Quimby;
"How a Woman Leans
to Fly"
1912 crosses British
Channel - killed three months later;
"Ambitious to be
among the pathfinders, she took her chances like a man and died like
one."
Critics -women
"temperamentally unfitted" to fly;
1920s & 1930s 500
licensed women pilots;
1929 Women's Air Derby
race;
Earhart: "If we
can't fly the race and navigate our own course through the Rockies, I won't
enter."
"Powder Puff
Derby"
"Ladybirds"
"angels" "sweethearts of the air"
1935 Bendix
cross-country race -1936 victory for Louise Thaden & Blanche Noyes;
“Ninety-Nines”
;
group;
Amelia Earhart
(1897-1937?)
1928
"Friendship" – first woman to cross Atlantic by plane ("on the sidelines when I wanted
to play the game itself")
Earhart hoped to
"quicken the interest of women in flying - the more women who become
pilots, the quicker we will be recognized as an important factor in
aviation."
"There is no
fundamental difference between men & women which would prevent women having
the same pleasure out of flying that men have."
1932 solo crossing
Atlantic, record time.
French Legion of
Honor, US
Distinguished Flying Cross, National Geographic Society's Gold
Medal;
Promotion of flying and
feminism – advisor to female students at Purdue;
1935 Earhart first to
solo Calif-Hawaii;
new goal - around-world
flight at equator -
set off June 1, 1937
- first
22,000 miles OK;
disappeared July 2, 1937
- Howland Island;
New York Times:
“She was in rebellion against a world which had been made, for women, too
safe, too unexciting. She wanted
to dare all that a man would dare.”
Women sell aviation
-
1934 Helen Richey wins
air-mail pilot competition - over 1000 hours accident-free flying
experience;
Commerce Dept bans women
flying in bad weather;
Earhart: "We hear
much of woman's 'nerves'. A woman
can sew, watch three things on the stove, keep an eye on four children, and
remain unperturbed. Half an hour
in a similar situation for a man completely shatters his nervous
system."
stewardesses (nursing
training) -
"Taking our
home-making instincts into the airlines, we can lend familiar aspects to which
travelers may cling."
1920s & 1930s
women’s “firsts” -
1920s Hollywood coming
of age - female
screenwriters,
occasionally directors;
virgin vs.
vamp;
Mary Pickford -
“America’s Sweetheart” -
$2,000 a week plus
bonuses.
1920 established United
Artists Studio (with Chaplin & Fairbanks);
Theda Bara -
“vamp” - “the wickedest face in the world, dark, brooding,
beautiful and heartless”.
Clara Bow, the
“It” girl – wholesome flirtatiousness;
Katherine Hepburn -
“I put on pants so many years ago and declared a sort of middle
road. I have not lived as a
woman. I have lived as a man. I’ve just done what I damned well
wanted to and I’ve made enough money to support myself.”
Mae West -
1925 wrote, produced
& starred Broadway play “Sex”,
1927 wrote “The
Drag” - eight days in jail;
1933 film “She
Done Him Wrong”;
role of “Diamond
Lil” – bold bad girl with brains & a heart of
gold;
“Why don’t
you come up and see me sometime?”
“Haven’t you
ever met a man who could make you happy? “ - “Sure – lots of
times.”
“It’s not
the men in your life, it’s the life in your
men.”
1934 – Hollywood
new Hays production code;
Gertrude Ederle 1926
English Channel;
Reporters: “a
battle won for feminism”;
Catt: proved that
“women’s freedom would go hand in hand with her bodily
strength.”
“perfectly
proportioned,” “nymphs,” “mermaids,”
“pretty plungers”;
Annette Kellermann,
Eleanor Holm, Esther Williams;
muscles
“profoundly unnatural”;
1928 Olympics -
eliminates medium & long-distance women’s races;
1932 Olympics - Babe
Didrikson
three track & field medals, records in javelin throw &
hurdles;
touring with men’s
exhibition baseball teams; establishes Ladies Professional Golf Assoc.
Life: “Babe is a Lady
Now: The World’s Most Amazing Athlete Has Learned to Wear Nylons and Cook
for Her Huge Husband.”
Eleanor Holm, “It’s a great thrill to compete
in the Olympics, but the moment I find swimming is… giving me big, bulky
muscles, making me look like an Amazon rather than a woman, I’ll toss it
to one side.”
Helen Wills, “the
American Girl” of tennis;
female athletes who
“can meet the male upon even terms”;
“damaged
mother” – “the very borderline of the pathological”
Pope Pius XI: need for
“reserve and modesty… the ornament and safeguard of
virtue”;
1928 exclusion from
American Legion baseball;
1938 banned from
competiting against men in fencing - “chivalry” -
“protect” women;
1924 state girls’
basketball tournament in Des Moines - almost 250 teams;
1925 Iowa High School
Athletic Association passed resolution to end girls’ basketball state
tournament;
Rural schools organize
independent Iowa girls’ athletic assoc.
six-player
”girls’ rules”
Margaret Bourke-White,
photographer -
1936 cover first issue
of Life; female war correspondent WWII.
Dorothea Lange,
photographer – out to “record the essence” of her
subjects;
First woman with exhibit
Museum of Modern Art;
Georgia O’Keeffe
(painter);
Isadora Duncan &
Martha Graham (dance);
Edna St. Vincent Millay
& Marianne Moore (poetry);
Dorothy Parker
(writer)
Aimee Semple McPherson -
world’s “most pulchritudinous evangelist”;
audiences of 12,000 each
evening for month;
$1.5 million temple; the
Four Square Gospel;
“electric
quality”;
1920s Calvin Coolidge:
“The business of America is business.”
Helena Rubenstein,
Elizabeth Arden, Madame CJ Walker
Female celebrities
showing off what women could accomplish -moving into new realms,
role models;