Women of 1920

A detailed Summary of Women of 1920

Becker, Susan D. and William Bruce Wheeler

"The 'New' Woman of the 1920's: Image and Reality."

Discovering the American Past, A Look at the Evidence. 4th ed. Vol. II. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.

The first part of the evidence (Sources 1 and 2) consists of excerpts from two best sellers: The Sheik and The Plastic Age. Both of these two sources are fiction but still portray the truth of these times in which they were written. In source 1, a young woman by the name of Diana Mayo is about to leave on a month-long journey through the desert. Lady Conway expresses her feelings of disapproval, by saying that Diana is behaving with a "recklessness and impropriety that is calculated to cast a slur not only on her own reputation, but also on the prestige of her country." I feel that men and women should be treated equally. I believe that a woman should be able to do what she pleases to do in life. At this time in history, women were not accepted in that way though. Diana encounters a man that is begging her not to leave, but she clearly expresses that she has no love for the man. She says that marriage for a woman means the end of her independence, and that she has never obeyed anyone in her life and she does not

In the pictures of Mary Pickford she looks as though she is very quite and possibly even scared of men. Whereas in the pictures of Clara Bow, She appears to be a very sexual seductress, in that she is wearing sexual clothing of that time period and she seems to enjoy that two men are picking her up and is confident she is wanted by those men.

The second part of the evidence is excerpts from two nonfiction books. The first being Woman and the New Race and the second titled Middletown. In Margaret Sanger's Woman and the New Race, she expresses the problem arising about birth control. Before forms of birth control existed women had no real choice of being a mother. They had to either sustain from sexual encounters or merge themselves into motherhood. If they chose to have sex, then this practically meant that their future of ever having some type of a career was over. Women were expected to stay at home and raise the children, while men were to bring home the bacon. I think that if a woman wants to have a career then she should have that right. I think that the development of birth control has really encouraged women all over the world to get educated and have a career for themselves. I do not approve of women resorting to birth control, just so that they can go out and have sex with every man coming and going, but young married couples that are not ready to have children extremely benefit from birth control. The Lynd's book Middletown, reveals that married working women were not as accepted as single working women, but the 1920 census indicated that 28 percent of working women were indeed married. This source states that a married woman's earnings would be considered property of their husbands. Many people thought that women in the work p

Some common words found in the essay are:
Woman Race, Feminist-New Style, Sanford Hugh, Lady Conway, Clara Bow, Hugh Carver, Plastic Age, Mifflin Company, Mary Pickford, Dunbar Bromley, birth control, women accepted, believe woman, woman race, stay home,

Approximate Word count = 1187
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: People