Title: How Flappers of the Roaring Twenties Redefined Womanhood - HISTORY
Headings: How Flappers of the Roaring Twenties Redefined Womanhood
How Flappers of the Roaring Twenties Redefined Womanhood
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Content: For the most part, however, the increase of working women didn’t represent a challenge to traditional gender roles. Nearly a third of working women in the 1920s were domestic servants, while the rest were clerical workers, factory workers, store clerks and other “feminized” professions. “ Women are working, but they're working in what are called 'women's jobs,’” says Lynn Dumenil, professor emerita of history at Occidental College and author of The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I.
Even women who blazed a trail in politics faced barriers due to their gender: Most female officeholders worked primarily on what were seen as “women’s issues,” preventing them from acquiring too much power within their political parties. It was progress though, with a handful of women would be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (none to the Senate), and many more served at the state and local levels. Not only were women hitting a glass ceiling with job fields, workplace discrimination and wage inequality also ran rampant throughout the ‘20s. As Gail Collins writes in her book America’s Women, the average weekly wage for men in 1927 was $29.35, compared to only $17.34 for women. While their wages were not high, women joined the new mass consumer culture. Their wages might not have matched that of their male counterparts, but working women used their purchasing power to join the nation’s new mass consumer culture. “