the "new woman"
Flappers
A flapper was a drastic change in comparison to what women used to be like in previous years. They started showing skin with shorter skirts. They started wearing shorter hair and makeup. They had a skinny boyish figure, which was very stylish at the time as well as unisex type of fashion. They drank, smoked cursed, danced, participating in petting parties, voted, and overall took risk. The Flapper attitude was characterized by truthfulness, fast-living, and sexual behavior. They were women that wanted to stay connected to their youth.
The most familiar symbol of the “Roaring Twenties” is probably the flapper: a young woman with bobbed hair and short skirts who drank, smoked and said what might be termed “unladylike” things, in addition to being more sexually “free” than previous generations. In reality, most young women in the 1920s did none of these things (though many did adopt a fashionable flapper wardrobe), but even those women who were not flappers gained some unprecedented freedoms. They could vote at last: The 19th Amendment to the Constitution had guaranteed that right in 1920. Millions of women worked in white-collar jobs (as stenographers, for example) and could afford to participate in the burgeoning consumer economy. The increased availability of birth-control devices such as the diaphragm made it possible for women to have fewer children. And new machines and technologies like the washing machine and the vacuum cleaner eliminated some of the drudgery of household work.
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“They were smart and sophisticated, with an air of independence about them, and so casual about their looks and clothes and manners as to be almost slapdash. I don't know if I realized as soon as I began seeing them that they represented the wave of the future, but I do know I was drawn to them. I shared their restlessness, understood their determination to free themselves of the Victorian shackles of the pre-World War I era and find out for themselves what life was all about.” Women's Suffrage
One of the most significant gains of the Women's movement in the 1920s was the freedom to vote. The 19th Amendment, ratified on August 18, 1920, granted women's suffrage. It was a historic achievement that was long overdue. Then a few years later, another equality movement was started by women, the congressional introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment. Under this law, women were to be granted federal protections for equality in all aspects of life. In addition to these political gains women also made gains in other territories. They made great gains in education by moving out of the conception of a stay at home women and into the college pathway. At the end of the 1920's they accounted for almost 40 percent of college degrees awarded in the United States,
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