646 Chapter 24 Postwar Society and Culture: Change and Adjustment
these exciting ideas, to say nothing of their own incli-
nations, young people found casting off their inhibi-
tions more and more tempting.
Conservatives bemoaned what they described
as the breakdown of moral standards, the fragmen-
tation of the family, and the decline of parental
authority—all with some reason. Nevertheless,
society was not collapsing. Much of the rebellious-
ness of the young, like their particular style of
dress, was faddish in nature, in a sense a kind of
youthful conformity. This was particularly true
of college students. Elaborate rituals governed
every aspect of their extracurricular life, which
was consuming a steadily larger share of most stu-
dents’ time and energy. Fraternity and sorority initi-
ations, “proms,” attendance at Saturday afternoon
football games, styles of dress, and college slang,
seemingly aspects of independence and free choice,
were nearly everywhere shaped and controlled by
peer pressure.
But young people’s new ways of relating to one
another, while influenced by the desire to conform,
were not mere fads and were not confined to people
under thirty. This can be seen most clearly in the
birth control movement, the drive to legalize the use
of contraceptives.
The “New” Woman
The young people of the 1920s were more open
about sex and perhaps more sexually precocious than
the young had been before the war. This does not
mean that most of them engaged in sexual inter-
course before marriage or that they tended to marry
earlier. Single young people might “believe in” birth
control, but relatively few (at least by modern stan-
dards) had occasion to practice it. Contraception was
a concern of married people, and particularly of mar-
ried women.
The leading American proponent of birth con-
trol in the 1920s, actually the person who coined the
term, was Margaret Sanger, one of the less self-cen-
tered Greenwich Village bohemians. Before the war
she was a political radical, a friend of Eugene Debs,
“Big Bill” Haywood, and the anarchist Emma
Goldman. Gradually, however, her attention focused
on the plight of the poor women she encountered
while working as a nurse; many of these women,
burdened by large numbers of children, knew noth-
ing about contraception. Sanger began to write arti-
cles and pamphlets designed to enlighten them, but
when she did so she ran afoul of the Comstock Act
of 1873, an anti-obscenity law that banned the dis-
tribution of information about contraception from
the mail. She was frequently in trouble with the law,
but she was persistent to the edge of fanaticism. In
1921 she founded the American Birth Control
League and two years later a research center. (Not
until the 1960s, however, did the Supreme Court
determine that the right to use contraceptives was
guaranteed by the Constitution.)
Other gender-based restrictions and limitations of
particular importance to women also seemed to be
breaking down. The divorce laws had been modified
in most states. More women were taking jobs,
attracted by the expanding demand for clerks, typists,
salespeople, receptionists, telephone operators, and
similar service-oriented occupations. Over 10.6 mil-
lion women were working by the end of the decade, in
contrast with 8.4 million in 1920. The Department of
Labor’s Women’s Bureau, outgrowth of a wartime
agency, was founded in 1920 and was soon conduct-
ing investigations of the working conditions women
faced in different industries and how various laws
affected them.
But most of these gains were illusory. Relaxation
of the strict standards of sexual morality did not
eliminate the double standard. More women
worked, but most of the jobs they held were still
menial or of a kind that few men wanted: domestic
service, elementary school teaching, clerical work,
selling behind a counter. When they competed for
jobs with men, women usually received much lower
wages. Women’s Bureau studies demonstrated this
repeatedly; yet when the head of the bureau, Mary
Anderson, tried to get employers to raise women’s
wages, most of them first claimed that the men had
families to support, and when she reminded them
that many female employees also had family respon-
sibilities, they told her that there was a “tacit under-
standing” that women were to make less than men.
“If I paid them the same,” one employer said, “there
would be a revolution.” Efforts to get the AmericanThe shape of Flapper sundresses minimized hips and breasts, and
the gossamer thinness of the fabric showed that the wearer was not
wearing a corset.