File with all readings in it.
"The broad span of highly charged opinion about the "modern woman" is apparent in this contemporary commentary from periodicals, novels, advertisements, political cartoons, photographs, a sociological study, a European's travelogue, and more. Selections can be divided among students for research and classroom discussion. Note the similarities and differences from later debates over women's place in society, especially "women's lib" in the 1960s and 1970s, and the "superwoman" question of today. (16 pp.)"
Arguments 11.4
Arguments 11.5
Arguments 11.6
Arguments 11.2
Homework CP: 1 page explaining the conflict over a woman's role and how it connects to our LT.
Homework: Honors Assignment: Continue reading through the readings that other people focused on and complete the following assignment (due Friday - grade: LT)
Write a short creative or narrative piece (newspaper editorial, newsreel segment, time-travel episode, dramatic scene, comedy sketch, memoir segment, free verse poem, etc.) to encapsulate the range of opinion about the "modern woman" in the 1920s, as reflected in this section's resources. You might begin or end with one of these statements.
- - "Let us be done forever with this nonsense about the equality of the sexes."John Macy, "Equality of Woman with Man: A Myth—A Challenge to Feminism," Harper's, November 1926
- - "Careers and children are satisfactory to women today when only a short while ago the two were thought incompatible."Dorothy Ducas, "Women's Economic Freedom Blamed in Marriage Decline," New York Evening Post, Jan. 5, 1929
- - "The house divided against itself does not, we observe, stand. Marriage dissolves in feminism as sugar melts in acid."Henry R. Carey, "This Two-Headed Monster—The Family," Harper's, January 1928
- - "The girls back in our college days were quite a diff'rent lot,
They couldn't throw the hammer and they couldn't put-the-shot,
They didn't know a hurdle from a hockey-stick, eh, what?
THEM DAYS IS GONE FOREVER!"Al Posen, Them Days Is Gone Forever, comic strip, Chicago Tribune, October 17, 1922 - - "Exactly what do women want now. Just this. They ask the same rights, in law and in custom, with which every man is now endowed through the accident of being born a male."Doris Stevens, "Suffrage Does Not Give Equality," The Forum, August 1924
- - "It is a great mistake, however, to think that woman can ever be completely independent of man, no matter what she wishes to believe or have others believe."Dr. Joseph Collins, "Woman's Morality in Transition," Current History, October 1927
- - "Today Eve is outstripping Adam in more ways than one.""Are Women's Sports Too Strenuous?" newsreel, British Pathé News, 1925
- - "[S]olitary dishwashing isn't enough to satisfy me—or many other women. We're going to chuck it. We're going to wash 'em by machinery, and come out and play with you men in the offices and clubs and politics you've cleverly kept for yourselves. Oh, we're hopeless, we dissatisfied women!"Carol Kennicott, in Sinclair Lewis, Main Street, novel, 1920
- - "To begin with, it is very important to realize to the full the special position of women in the United States as contrasted with the rest of the world."Christine M. Frederick, Selling Mrs. Consumer, 1929
