312 Making It New: 1900–1945modes of thought and expression and absorbed into literary and artistic movements
that ignored the existence of national boundaries. The revolt against earlier norms
of belief and behavior was not, people like Ernest Hemingway and Hart Crane
discovered, a purely American prerogative; the anxious need to have the emergent
culture, and the new sensations it engendered, adequately explained, was not the
monopoly of either side of the Atlantic. So, while remaining American writers, they
began to participate in the international experiments of Symbolism, Surrealism, and
Dadaism; the resources of language they carried with them from the New World
were added to, and enriched, by their encounter with the Old. Whether they ventured
to Europe only for a while, or stayed most of their lives, or whether, for that matter,
they stayed firmly within the boundaries of the United States, very many American
writers became involved in literary movements or tendencies that denied the
traditional categories of history and geography. Above all, they became involved in
what has become known as modernism. Modernism, the major and most widespread
response to what Adams had seen as the “multiverse,” can be defined in terms of its
feelings – principally, of cultural exile and alienation. It can be defined in terms of
its forms, which incline toward the innovative, the disjunctive, associative, and
experimental. It can be defined in terms of its more specific stylistic features: a
willingness to disrupt traditional syntax and form, to mix together modes or levels
of writing that had traditionally been kept separate, and to risk possible incoherence
so as to challenge preconceived notions of order, stability, and value. But perhaps the
most fundamental definition stems from the historical perception shared by so
many different writers of this period, American or otherwise, that things had altered
beyond established means of recognition. As Virginia Woolf put it, in 1912 human
nature changed; or, as D. H. Lawrence preferred it, in 1915 the old world ended. And
the aim of modernism was to place questions of form and structure, aesthetic vision,
uppermost so as to achieve or move toward newer, more appropriate means of
recognition – to enable writer and reader to begin to see things properly, truly again.
“Some people,” a reporter for the New York Sun commented in the 1920s, “think
that women are the cause of modernism, whatever that is.” For many observers, as this
comment suggests, there was a connection between modernism as a process of social
transformation, modernism as a cultural movement, and feminism, the emergence of
the “new woman.” Whatever the truth of this, the change in the position of women
during this period was remarkable. In 1920 the 19th Amendment giving American
women the right to vote was adopted. At the same time, the spread of scientific,
reasonably reliable methods of birth control was enabling women to exercise some
limited control over their lives. The fall in the birth rate was dramatic. In 1800, white
women bore on average seven children; in 1860, that was down to 5.21; but by 1920 it
had fallen dramatically further, to an average per person of 3.17. Opportunities for
education grew during this period, especially at higher level; women were making
many of the new professions their own; and it was women who mainly led the
successful campaign to establish female suffrage, just as they were to lead an equally
successful campaign to prohibit the sale of alcohol, a prohibition that lasted from
1920 to 1933. Admittedly, the new professions women began to enter, like social work,GGray_c04.indd 312ray_c 04 .indd 312 8 8/1/2011 7:53:45 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 45 AM