Introduction
The early twentieth-century ushered Americans into the modern era, a time of changing social practices that coalesced with a new way of living for many people.1 This was a time when “Americans moved into the modern age” while simultaneously disregarding many traditions of the Victorian era.2
In times of rapid change, many turn to the home, seeing it as a bastion of societal values. While many Americans dealt with the rise of consumerism and a cultural war over such issues as evolution, divorce, prohibition, women’s role in society, and race, some retreated to the home eager to perpetuate the beliefs they had always known.3
Central to this concept of the home was the early twentieth-century woman. While women generally began to take a larger role in public life, they were still expected to cling to their femininity and to the domesticity of the home.
This shift impacted traditional views of marriage and etiquette, and women worked to maintain their feminine image of a wife and mother.4 With the beginning of World War I, women were required to step up and assume the role of an active citizen rather than just the center of the domestic sphere. Their efforts in rationing food and working in industry transformed women’s role in the U.S. during war time. As the industrial sector took over everyday life, women worked to keep the grime of hard labor out of the home by enforcing a strong sense of Christian morality.
It is difficult to qualify one of these aspects, marriage, etiquette, patriotism, and religion, as having the largest impact on gender roles. Each had a distinct influence on different parts of men, women, and family’s lives. Instead, we must ask how progressive was the Progressive Era? We argue, with the support of the artifacts in our exhibit, that the Progressive Era allowed primarily only white middle-class women to make advances in the political sphere, under a somewhat misogynistic ideology.
Explore these influences in marriage, etiquette, patriotism, and religion by clicking on the sidebar headings accordingly.
1Paula S. Fass, “Introduction: Youth in the 1920’s,” in The Damned and the Beautiful, (US: Oxford University Press 1979), accessed April 7, 2016, ProQuest ebrary, 5.
2Ibid.
3“Digital History: 1920’s,” S. Mintz & S. McNeil, accessed April 6, 2016, http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/era.cfm?eraid=13
4Mary Wood-Allen, M.D., What a Young Woman Ought to Know (Sylvanus Stall, 1913), 135.