how did women's roles change during the 1920s

No cultural symbol of the 1920s is more recognizable than the flapper. A immature adult female with a curt "bob" hairstyle, cigarette dangling from her painted lips, dancing to a alive jazz band. Flappers romped through the Roaring Twenties, enjoying the new freedoms ushered in past the end of the Get-go World War and the dawn of a new era of prosperity, urbanism and consumerism.

The decade kicked off with passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave white women the vote. Women also joined the workforce in increasing numbers, participated actively in the nation's new mass consumer civilization, and enjoyed more liberty in their personal lives. Despite the heady freedoms embodied by the flapper, real liberation and equality for women remained elusive in the 1920s, and it would be left to later generations of women to fully benefit from the social changes the decade set in motion.

The verbal origins of the word 'flapper' remain unknown.
While the exact origin of the term "flapper" is unknown, it is assumed to have originated in U.k. before World War I, when it was used to draw gawky young teenage girls. After the war, the word would become synonymous with the new breed of 1920s women who bobbed their pilus higher up their ears, wore skirts that skimmed their knees, smoked cigarettes and drank alcohol while dancing in jazz clubs, always surrounded by admiring male suitors.

Two flapper women and their dates having a smoke. (Credit: Kirn Vintage Stock/Corbis via Getty Images) — Two flapper women and their dates having a fume. (Credit: Kirn Vintage Stock/Corbis via Getty Images)

Flappers were divers by how they dressed, danced and talked.
Equally Joshua M. Zeitz writes in Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex activity, Manner, Celebrity and the Women Who Made America Modern, flapper fashion wouldn't have been complete without the creeping hemline, which by 1925 or 1936 reached a shocking top of 14 inches above the ground. Sheer stockings, sometimes even rolled beneath the knees, completed the scandalous await.

Flappers wore their skirts shorter so they could evidence off their legs and ankles—just also then they could dance. They particularly loved the Charleston, a 1920s dance craze involving waving arms and fast-moving feet that had been pioneered by African Americans, first in the South and later in Harlem.

Dancing proved challenging in traditional women's fashion, not only with long dresses, but as well traditional corsets that tightly bound a woman's midsection and accentuated her waist. Around 1923, French designer Coco Chanel introduced what became known as the "garçonne look," featuring not but high hemlines but dropped or nonexistent waistlines and straight, sleeveless tops. With lighter and more flexible undergarments that created a directly, slim silhouette, this new design immune women to dance freely.

It wasn't just their style that fabricated flappers; It was too their behavior and attitude. Flappers were young, fast-moving, fast-talking, reckless and unfazed past previous social conventions or taboos. They smoked cigarettes, drank booze, rode in and drove cars and kissed and "petted" with unlike men.

Women move to cities and into the workforce, but stayed in traditional 'women's roles.'
The flapper was built-in out of a growing landscape in America. By 1920, for the first time in the nation's history, more than Americans (51 percent) were living in cities rather than in rural areas. As part of the nation's urbanization and economic growth, more and more than women were entering the workforce. By 1929, more than a quarter of all women, and more one-half of single women, were gainfully employed.

For the nigh office, however, the increase of working women didn't represent a claiming to traditional gender roles. Nearly a third of working women in the 1920s were domestic servants, while the rest were clerical workers, factory workers, store clerks and other "feminized" professions. "Women are working, only they're working in what are called 'women's jobs,'" says Lynn Dumenil, professor emerita of history at Occidental College and author of The 2nd Line of Defense: American Women and Earth War I.

Fifty-fifty women who blazed a trail in politics faced barriers due to their gender: Almost female person officeholders worked primarily on what were seen equally "women'south problems," preventing them from acquiring as well much power inside their political parties. It was progress though, with a handful of women would be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (none to the Senate), and many more served at the state and local levels.

Not only were women hit a drinking glass ceiling with job fields, workplace discrimination and wage inequality also ran rampant throughout the '20s. Every bit Gail Collins writes in her volume America's Women, the average weekly wage for men in 1927 was $29.35, compared to only $17.34 for women.

While their wages were not loftier, women joined the new mass consumer civilization.
Their wages might not have matched that of their male counterparts, just working women used their purchasing power to join the nation's new mass consumer civilisation. "The nature of domestic life changes for urban women, certainly, in the '20s," Dumenil says. By 1927, about two-thirds of American homes would have electricity, and new consumer goods like the washing automobile, refrigerator and vacuum cleaner were revolutionizing housework and home life. Women were the major target audience for many of the new products, including household appliances, clothing and cosmetics.

The rise of the motorcar contributed to the sense of freedom and possibility that suffused the Roaring Twenties. "The motorcar is central to Americans' lives in the 1920s, beyond the board," Dumenil explains. "Not anybody tin afford i, but consumer credit besides expands in the '20s," leading to a new generation of American debtors. Meanwhile, the information revolution brought about by the emergence of the radio allowed a newly vibrant, youth-centered, urban culture to spread across the United States.

The flapper lifestyle as well affected marriages and sexuality.
Housework wasn't the only factor changing for women on the home front end. "The nature of spousal relationship starts to alter," Dumenil explains. "There's more of a sense, non of equality, but more of companionship betwixt men and women in marriage. The assumption about women's sexuality changes." Birth control was becoming more widely available, at to the lowest degree for more privileged women, which helped limit family size and allowed women the freedom to explore their sexuality without facing the consequences of unwanted pregnancies.

"At least for some women, there'south more than freedom in their personal lives [in the 1920s]," Dumenil says. "A piffling less restriction. And information technology's not just near sex, although that's part of it, but wearable, dancing, the social world and the like."

This freedom had limits, however, and marriage always remained the ultimate goal. As Collins writes, only nigh 10 per centum of women in the 1920s kept their jobs after wedlock, nearly of them working-class women whose family needed their paycheck.

Dumenil besides points that the the fright of one's reputation still worried flappers. "There'southward a sense that you lot accept to be really careful about your sexual activity, for fear that you'll lose your reputation and won't get married....So the flapper'southward wildness is always, I would say, contained by that."

Zelda Fitzgerald and the terminate of the Roaring Twenties.
Arguably the most famous flapper of all was Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, who, before coming together and marrying the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, spent her nights whirling around land club dances (and sneaking out to drink and "neck") with any number of immature Alabama gentlemen. Afterwards their spousal relationship in 1920, the hard-partying couple lived the ultimate Roaring Twenties lifestyle in both New York Metropolis and France. Though Zelda was an artist, a dancer and a writer herself, she would exist best known equally the muse inspiring her husband'due south bright stories of life in the Jazz Age, which are often credited with creating the enduring paradigm of the flapper. By the late '20s, however, Scott'south drinking and Zelda's mental disease collection them apart. In 1930, Zelda had a nervous breakdown, and she would spend the rest of her life in sanatoriums.

In some ways, Zelda's pass up paralleled that of the flapper prototype she embodied. The stock marketplace crash of October 1929 finer marked the end of the Roaring Twenties, an era F. Scott Fitzgerald would later telephone call "the most expensive orgy in history." By the onset of the Great Depression, Hollywood and the mass media had moved on from the flappers, and in the 1930s women's fashion would revert to more traditional styles, with accentuated waists and longer hemlines.

The spirit of the flappers lives on.
Some changes that occurred in the 1920s endured. Though the Depression wiped out much of America's prosperity and consumer confidence, the nation's mass consumer culture would somewhen re-emerge, stronger than ever.

In the decades to come, more and more than women would pursue higher education and enter political life every bit activists, lobbyists or lawmakers. The transformation of sexual mores and family unit life that occurred in the 1920s likewise persisted. "Changes in the family, the movement toward smaller families, nascency control, less restraints in private life," Dumenil says—these modify were "permanent."