The Younger Generation 643indulgence; toilet training should begin early in infancy;
thumb sucking should be suppressed; too much kissing
could turn male youngsters into “mama’s boys.”
“Children are made not born,” John B. Watson, a
former president of the American Psychological
Association who was also a vice president of the J. Walter
Thompson advertising agency, explained in The
Psychological Care of Infant and Child(1928). “Never
hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you
must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say
good night.”
Another school favored a more permissive
approach. Toilet training could wait; parents should
pay attention to their children’s expressed needs, not
impose a generalized set of rules on them.
The growth of large cities further loosened social
constraints on sexuality. Amidst the sea of people that
surged down the streets or into the subways, the soli-
tary individual acquired a freedom derived from
anonymity. (For further perspective on urban life, see
Re-Viewing the Past Chicago, pp. 644–645.)
Homosexuals, in particular, developed a set of identi-
fying signals and fashioned a distinctive culture in
parks, cafeterias, nightclubs, and rooming houses of
big cities. Because most others wrongly assumed that
male homosexuality was characterized by effeminacy,
they were unaware of the extent of the emerging gay
culture. But by the late 1920s and early 1930s homo-
sexual parades, dances, and nightclub acts had
become public events.
The Younger Generation
The Great War profoundly affected the generation
born around the turn of the century. It had raised
and then dashed their hopes for the future. Now the
narrowness and prudery of so many of their elders
and the stuffy conservatism of nearly all politicians
seemed not merely old-fashioned but ludicrous. The
actions of red-baiters and reactionaries led them to
exaggerate the importance of their right to express
themselves in bizarre ways. Their models and indeed
some of their leaders were the prewar Greenwich
Village bohemians.
The 1920s has been described as the Jazz Age,
the era of “flaming youth,” when young people
danced to syncopated “African” rhythms, careened
about the countryside in automobiles in search of
pleasure and forgetfulness, and made gods of movie
stars and professional athletes. This view of the
period bears a superficial resemblance to reality.
“Younger people,” one observer noted in 1922,
were attempting “to create a way of life free from
the bondage of an authority that has lost all mean-
ing.” But if they differed from their parents and
grandparents, it was primarily because young people
were adjusting to more profound and more rapid
changes in their world than their grandparents could
have imagined.
Beliefs that only the avant-garde had held
before the war became commonplace; trends that
were barely perceptible during the Progressive Era
now reached avalanche proportions. This was par-
ticularly noticeable in relationships between the
sexes. Courtship, for example, was transformed. In
the late nineteenth century, a typical young man
“paid a call” on a female friend. He met and con-
versed with her parents, perhaps over coffee and
cookies. The couple remained at home, the parents
nearby if not actually participating in what was
essentially a social (one might say, public) event held
in a private place.
By the 1920s paying calls was being replaced by
dating; the young man called only to “pick up” his
“date,” to go off, free of parental supervision, to
whatever diversion they wished. Many dating conven-
tions counteracted the trend toward freedom in sex-
ual matters. A man asked a woman “for a date”
because dating meant going somewhere and spending
money, and the man was expected to do the trans-
porting and pay the bill. This made the woman dou-
bly dependent; under the old system,sheprovided the
refreshments, and there was no taboo against her
doing the inviting.
But for young people of the 1920s, relations
between the sexes were becoming more relaxed and
uninhibited. Respectable young women smoked
cigarettes, something previously done in public
only by prostitutes and bohemian types. They cast
off heavy corsets, wore lipstick and “exotic” per-
fumes, and shortened both their hair and their
skirts, the latter rising steadily from instep to ankle
to calf to knee and beyond as the decade pro-
gressed. For decades female dressmakers and
beauty salon proprietors had sold their own beauty
products and potions. By 1920, however, new cos-
metic corporations, managed primarily by men,
appropriated the products and marketing strategies
of local women entrepreneurs and catered to
national mass markets.
Freudian psychology and the more accessible
ideas of the British “sexologist” Havelock Ellis
reached steadily deeper into the popular psyche.
According to A. A. Brill, the chief American popular-
izer of Freud’s theories, the sex drive was irrepress-
ible. “Love and sex are the same thing,” he wrote.
“The urge is there, and whether the individual desires
it or no, it always manifests itself.” Since sex was “the
central function of life,” Ellis argued, it must be “sim-
ple and natural and pure and good.” Bombarded by