Women of the 20s and 30s

The suffragettes kept marching and protesting without cease until they got their 19th Amendment in 1920. The Great War aided their cause a great deal, as women flocked to the factories in droves to make up for the men sent overseas to fight in the war. They were able to show they could work just as hard as any man could, and were far more stubborn as well since they continued to demand voting rights during a time when they should have been concentrating solely on the war effort.


The infamous Rosie the Riveter propaganda poster.

But continue with their cause they did, and the 19th Amendment was the tasty fruit of their labor. Many women dropped out of the suffragette, now called feminist, movement afterwards, feeling that they had been rewarded all the rights they deserved. Alice Paul and her radicals didn't fade out though; they went on trampling everywhere, attempting to get the Equal Rights Act passed by Congress, and generally fighting for women to have all the same rights as men. Part of this continued movement did indeed focus on all women, regardless of color (mostly). The day when Alice Paul dies will be a sad one; the death of this typhoon will be a sad day indeed.

As the years went on ticking with corporations and government throwing poor people under the bus, racism running rampant in all economic fields, and religion kept trying to become supreme ruler of America - business as usual, essentially - women didn't fade away into the background and stay stagnant like men thought they would after the passage of the 19th amendment. Whether young or old, women refused to become wallpaper again.

Women became the shoppers of the era. Housewives made all the purchases for their households from food to clothing to appliances such as vacuum cleaners. Younger women, usually single but not always, shopped for themselves, buying trinkets like jewelry, small home decor pieces, and the latest fashion. These younger women received their wages from the new 'womanly' job sector of industrialization: department store sellers, laundresses, clothing manufacturing, teachers, and the such. These jobs gave women a sense of purpose, self-respect, and especially freedom. The fashionable clothing they bought was quite different from the clothing older, married women bought. Radically different.



Yes, the 1920s: era of The Flapper

Skirts cut above the knee? Short hair like a boy? High heels? Wore makeup? Thin and flat? The personification of their mothers' worst nightmare.
They went out without escorts, smoked in public, danced with strangers in nightclubs, drank at bars with men - flappers rebelled against every Victorian-age rule there was and then some.

Young women of the 1920s sought to be every bit as free as their male counterparts. They threw most modesty out the window and engaged in sexual activities outside of their marital bedroom. Many attempts were made to more widely distribute birth control than before, but religious communities quickly smothered these efforts - though by the end of the 30s, birth control was available to women with large families in order to lessen the burden on her husband to provide for such a large crowd of children.

Outside of this, flappers didn't really do much else. They took the reins on their own lives but politically, they accomplished nothing. They actually probably contributed to the regression of women's rights.

National Recovery Administration codes set lower required minimum wages for women than men working the same job.
New Deal job agencies such as the CCC and CWA refused to hire women and colored people.
Social Security Act and the Fair Labor Standards Acts didn't cover domestic and agricultural work - women's main two areas of work.

And then added to all this (or perhaps the true cause of?) was the idea - sexist and religious - that women belonged tucked away at home to domesticate rough, rowdy bread-winning men and raise the future workers of America,  the children.

In addition to female discrimination in the workplace, blatant racism was running as rampant as ever. More African America were migrating to cities than ever before, in search of jobs after crop failures, crop prices dropping, and general debt pileup. African American women found work mostly as domestic servants while the men scrounged the city streets for any job they could find, no matter how dirty or rough. As previously mentioned, blacks weren't aided or protected by the New Deal agencies and codes and were left to struggle on their own.

Racists took the new social security movement and used it to discriminate against against African Americans even more. Women were hurt the most, as their domestics jobs weren't covered or protected as mention earlier, with the added stigma that any black woman on social security/welfare was lazy, greedy, and un-American. The new stigma hurt their attempts to get jobs, or better ones, to no one's surprise.

[Out of time period analysis: welfare is actually used to break apart families, particularly black ones. A black woman with children gets more support without the father around than if he was with them and had a minimum wage job. So the government supports broken, unhealthy black families that at greater risk of turning to crime to get out of poverty which in turn gives government a 'reason' to break apart these 'violent thugs' families at the earliest chance.]

Even today this stigma holds great power in people's minds. Single white women are the largest group to be aided by welfare yet society's idea of the average welfare recipient is a lazy, fat black woman. African American men get paid about 75¢ to every white man's dollar, and African American women get paid 70¢ to that same dollar. This means less money going into social security for them, so later when/if they retire they'll get less money than a white man or woman who worked the exact same job as them! Cheated all around, then get labeled lazy and greedy when all blacks want is the same respect and rights as the whites around them.