Federation of Labor to take up the issue failed; few
of the unions in the federation admitted women.
More women graduated from college, but the
colleges placed more emphasis on subjects like
home economics that seemed designed to make
them better housewives rather than professional
nutritionists or business executives. As one Vassar
College administrator (a woman!) said, colleges
should provide “education for women along the
lines of their chief interests and responsibilities,
motherhood and the home.”
The 1920s proved disillusioning to feminists,
who now paid a price for their single-minded pursuit
of the right to vote in the Progressive Era. After the
ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, Carrie
Chapman Catt was exultant: “We are no longer peti-
tioners,” she announced, “but free and equal citi-
zens.” Many activists, assuming the battle won, lost
interest in agitating for change. They believed that
the suffrage amendment had given them the one
weapon needed to achieve whatever women still
lacked. In fact, it soon became apparent that women
did not vote as a bloc. Many married women voted
for the candidates their husbands supported.
When radical feminists discovered that voting did
not automatically bring true equality, they founded
the National Woman’s Party (NWP) and began cam-
paigning for an equal rights amendment. Their
dynamic leader, Alice Paul, disdained specific goals
such as disarmament, ending child labor, and liberal-
ized birth control. Total equality for women was the
one objective. The party considered protective legisla-
tion governing the hours and working conditions of
women discriminatory. This caused the so-called social
feminists, who believed that children and working
women needed the protection provided by such laws,
to break away.
The NWP never attracted a wide following, but
only partly because of the split with the social femi-
nists. Many of the younger radical women, like the
bohemians of the Progressive Era, were primarily
concerned with their personal freedom to behave as
they wished; politics did not interest them. But a
more important reason was that nearly all the radi-
cals failed to see that questions of gender—the atti-
tudes that men and women were taughtto take
toward each other, not immutable physical or psy-
chological differences—stood in the way of sexual
equality. Many more women joined the more mod-
erate League of Women Voters, which attempted to
mobilize support for a broad spectrum of reforms,
some of which had no specific connection to the
interests of women as such. The entire women’s
movement lost momentum. The battle for the equal
rights amendment persisted through the 1930s, but
it was lost. By the end of that decade the movement
was moribund.
Margaret Sanger, Happiness in Marriageat
http://www.myhistorylab.comPopular Culture: Movies and Radio
The postwar decade saw immense changes in popular
culture. Unlike the literary flowering of the era (see
pp. 654–656), these changes seemed in tune with the
times, not a reaction against them. This was true in
part because they were products as much of technol-
ogy as of human imagination.
The first motion pictures were made around
1900, but the medium only came into its own after the
Great War. The early films, such as the eight-minute
epic The Great Train Robbery (1903), were brief,
action-packed, and unpretentious. Professional actors
and most educated people viewed them with amusedReadtheDocumentPopular Culture: Movies and Radio 647This photograph of Margaret Sanger was taken during her trial in
January 1917. Having opened the nation’s first birth control clinic
in Brooklyn, New York, she was convicted of disseminating
information on contraception and served thirty days in prison.
Friends had advised Sanger to dress conservatively and affect a
persona of motherhood. Despite her demure clothing, her eyes
express her characteristic assertiveness.