The Position of Women: Flappers and Their Limits
An Image and a Reality
The 1920s gave America one of its most iconic images: the flapper — bobbed hair, short dress, cigarette in hand, dancing the Charleston in a Manhattan club. The flapper looked like proof that women had been liberated. Look more closely and the picture splits in two: a small, mainly urban, mainly young, mainly middle-class group whose lives genuinely changed; and a much larger group of rural, working-class, immigrant and African-American women whose daily realities barely shifted.
In 1920 the 19th Amendment stopped any state denying women the vote. Across the decade flappers also drove cars, went out unchaperoned, smoked and drank in public, wore knee-length dresses and danced the Charleston. These were genuinely new freedoms — but they were largely confined to young, urban, middle-class white women.
What Changed: The Flapper’s World
The 19th Amendment was the political symbol of the change but it had been a long fight: the suffrage movement led by figures like Carrie Chapman Catt had campaigned since the 1840s, and women’s war work in 1917-18 had shifted the politics. After 1920 women could vote in every state. Public opinion shifted: in 1923 the Equal Rights Amendment was first proposed in Congress (though never passed during the decade). Female participation in higher education climbed, and a small but growing minority of women entered the professions.
Wyoming had given women the vote as early as 1869 as a territory, and by 1918 fifteen states had followed. The First World War tipped the balance nationally. Around 25,000 American women had served as nurses near the front and tens of thousands more had taken factory jobs, made munitions, run farms or volunteered with the Red Cross while men were called up. President Wilson, who had refused to back a federal amendment in 1916, told the Senate in 1918 that giving women the vote was vital to winning the war. The 19th Amendment passed Congress in 1919 and was ratified by Tennessee — the deciding state — in August 1920. By the November 1920 election about 8 million women voted for the first time, though African-American women in the South were still blocked by Jim Crow laws covered in Lesson 2.
Domestic life shifted for those who could afford it. Electricity reached around 70% of urban households by 1929 but fewer than one farm in ten; refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and washing machines (almost all bought on hire purchase) cut hours of housework. Women had more leisure time and more disposable income, which the cosmetics industry, fashion magazines and Hollywood studios were eager to capture. Birth rates fell as more women used contraception; family size in the cities dropped from an average of around four children to closer to three across the decade.
Working Women
More American women worked outside the home than ever before — about 10.5 million by 1929, around 25% of the female adult population. But equality at work was distant. Women earned roughly half a male wage for the same job. They were concentrated in ‘women’s work’: secretarial work, teaching (especially of young children), nursing, telephone operating, retail. The new office economy of 1920s America — advertising agencies, banks, big city stores — created hundreds of thousands of typing and switchboard jobs that were marketed almost exclusively to young single women.
Many employers operated marriage bars — rules that forced women to resign on marriage. School boards across the country imposed them on female teachers. Bigger industrial employers preferred male breadwinners and would dismiss married women first in any downturn. So the white-collar boom in clerical work was largely a boom for unmarried women in their twenties; once they married, the door closed. Top professions — law, medicine, engineering, banking — remained overwhelmingly male: women were under 5% of US doctors and lawyers in 1929.
Women in Rural America
For the millions of women on America’s farms, the 1920s looked very different. Without electricity, washing meant heating water on a wood stove; without refrigeration, food preservation meant canning every summer. Rural birth rates remained much higher than urban ones: many farms still depended on family labour. A 1929 survey by the Department of Agriculture found that the average farm wife worked over 60 hours a week. The flapper image — with its knee-length dress, lipstick and cigarette — would have been unthinkable in most small towns: it was both unaffordable and morally condemned.
African-American and Immigrant Women
For African-American women in the South, voting rights granted by the 19th Amendment were undermined by Jim Crow restrictions covered in Lesson 2 (literacy tests, poll taxes, intimidation). They also faced economic exclusion: most worked as domestic servants or sharecroppers’ wives, with little access to clerical or factory jobs. Recent immigrants from Italy, Poland and the Russian Empire often combined factory work, piecework at home and large families — their lives more closely resembled pre-war working-class women than the flappers in nearby cinemas.
The flapper image is misleading as a picture of all women. Genuine 1920s gains — the vote, white-collar work, the cosmetics and fashion industries, lower urban birth rates — mainly benefited young, urban, white, middle-class women. Rural women, working-class women, African-Americans and recent immigrants saw far less change.
A Limited Liberation
The flapper was a real cultural figure, but she was a small one. Most 1920s American women were not flappers. The decade matters less because it liberated women than because it produced an idea of liberation that women in the 1960s feminist movement (Lesson 13) would later pick up, criticise and extend. The Boom narrowed the gap between what women could do and what they were allowed to do — but it did not close it.