Making It New: 1900–1945 313nursing, and librarianship, tended to be ones with low pay and social status; to that
extent, they were like older, more established jobs, such as teaching, that had tradi-
tionally been a female prerogative. And the more lucrative professions, like medicine
and the law, were still mostly closed to women for half a century. So, for that matter,
were positions in business and finance, and in the skilled trades. But American women
had a higher profile in public life and a greater freedom of choice in their personal
lives than they had ever had before. And with the vote in their hands, some eighty
years after the Seneca Falls Convention, they had some degree of real political power.
Or, rather, white women of the middling classes had. Women of other ethnic
groups, and white working women, like their male counterparts, continued to be
mostly marginalized and dispossessed. Some 40 percent of working women, especially
African-Americans, were still engaged in household labor. For that matter, while the
“new woman” or the “flapper” might excite the public imagination with ideas of
female freedom or female sexuality, most Americans still tended to believe that a
woman’s proper place was in the home – and that the sexuality of anyone, but par-
ticularly the female kind, needed to be kept under lock and key. This was also the
period of the Committee for the Suppression of Vice and a Motion Picture Production
Code that prevented the depiction of a man and a woman, even husband and wife,
together in bed. It was also the period when the editors of The Little Review – one of
the little magazines that proliferated at this time, as an outlet for modernism and
other literary experiment – was fined one hundred dollars for publishing part of
Ulysses by James Joyce. American culture, for all its general gravitation toward the
social forms of modernity and the artistic forms of modernism, was still a complex
of different, conflicting interests, more a collision of cultures than a monolith. Labor
fought with triumphalist and eventually triumphant capitalism: the Industrial
Workers of the World, a union embracing all working people, was founded in 1905;
Eugene Debs captured nearly a million votes as the socialist candidate for president
in 1920; there were major if ultimately unsuccessful strikes in the coal and rail
industries in 1922. Traditionalism fought with the new thought: in 1925 a young
schoolteacher named Scopes was put on trial in Tennessee for teaching Darwinian
theories of evolution. And various ethnic and immigrant groups, the other Americans,
demanded attention, wanted their claims to an American identity to be heard.
In the 1920s in particular, immigration to the United States reached new levels,
comparable to those of the 1880s and provoking another moral panic: new
immigration quotas were consequently implemented in 1924. Many of these
newcomers ended up living in the cities. All of them supplied writers with a different
twist on the modernist theme of exile: these were strangers in a strange land in a
different, more mundane and material sense than that often felt and meant by the
major modernist writers. And it often provoked those who wrote about them to
favor the realism of social record to literary experiment. Native Americans continued
to suffer their own forms of cultural dislocation. Subjected first to removal to
reservations, then to the social experiment of the Allotment Act – which gave
individual allotments of land to individuals who were then, very often, tricked out
of them – they suffered their own peculiar extremes of exile. Stripped of their tribalGGray_c04.indd 313ray_c 04 .indd 313 8 8/1/2011 7:53:45 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 45 AM