Issue 1: Women in the 1920s

Transcription

1 Issue 1: Women in the 1920s In "New Freedom and the Girls," the editor of Harper's comments upon the changes in women's clothing and how these changes have affected attitudes of American women during this era. Excerpted from "New Freedom and the Girls," by Edward S. Martin, Harper's, August 1926, p The release of women from clothing in the last thirty years is marvelous and almost all to the good. In the June Forum someone tells a story of seeing a young woman in London about twenty years ago and noticing as she passed that the sleeves of her frock were of some light stuff that left her arms visible. He noticed it because it was unusual, and kept an eye on the girl for a moment or two, especially as he saw that she attracted not only his attention but that of other people. But as he watched he saw her surrounded by something like a small mob all interested and some of them jeering at her, and then he got a policeman and went to her rescue, got her into a cab and took her to her hotel. She was an American girl, filled with dismay at her adventure and extremely astonished, because she said that in New York all women were wearing such sleeves as hers when she came away. The year before the war [1913] when this present [editor of Harper's], being in Ostend admired the women bathers in onepiece suits, a newspaper which he read recorded the mobbing of women in Atlantic City for appearing on the bathing beach without stockings. All that has changed. Here, as in Europe now, the bathing girls have beaten Mrs. Grundy and the police. There is a series of amusing pictures running in Life that gives the costumes of women in what Life calls The Gay Nineties. In the Nineties women really wore clothes, a lot of them, at all seasons of the year; and in the Seventies they wore still more: bustles and vast panoplies of silk or other dress material, and earlier than that they had crinoline and tiers of starched skirts, most extraordinary. Still earlier they had pantalettes. But now look at them! A young woman carries her summer wardrobe in a satchel. The baggage-express business is in straits. Saratoga trunks are seen only in attics. What you cannot carry on a motor car does not go. The textile trades are in trouble. The hosiery makers must be in clover, and woman has emerged to a degree that makes some people rather nervous, and the chief and almost the only remonstrant is the Catholic Church, which in the interest perhaps of celibacy, is strong for keeping women covered, neck, arms, and legs, at least in church. One cannot be sure that there will not be a recurrence of concealing garments for women because the textile people need more money and the fashion makers must keep the fashions changing if they can for the good of business. But these current clothes are popular; doctors say they are very healthy; the ladies were never more admired, and seem likely to stick to the present modes of garb in spite of al the machinations of dressmakers. So there is a great reform accomplished without the aid of laws, in spite of the police and quite outside of politics.

2 Leading birth control advocate Margaret Sanger launched a controversial and short-lived publication in 1914 entitled The Woman Rebel. Later, she established The Birth Control Review. Excerpts from both publications follow. They demonstrate how Sanger and fellow birth control advocates believed that contraception provided the key to women's true liberation, and perhaps the liberation of all society. Margaret Sanger's comment on Women's Right to Birth Control, Birth Control Review, January 1928 Women's desire for freedom is born of the feminine spirit, which is the absolute, elemental inner urge of womanhood. It is the strongest force in her nature; it cannot be destroyed. The chief obstacles to the normal expression of this force are undesired pregnancy and the burden of unwanted children. Society, in dealing with the feminine spirit can resort to violence in an effort to enslave the elemental urge of womanhood, making of woman a mere instrument of reproduction and punishing her when she revolts. Or, it can permit her to choose whether she shall become a mother and how many children she will have. It can go on crushing what is uncrushable, or it can recognize woman's claim to freedom, and cease to impose destructive barriers. If we choose the latter course we must not only remove all restrictions on the use of contraceptives, but we must legalize and encourage their use. The movement for birth control also had a coercive, eugenicist edge, exemplified by the following essay. Excerpted from "Birth Control," by Ella K. Dearborn, Birth Control Review, March 1928, p. 88. It is an injustice to both parents and child to bring an unwelcome baby into the world. Most people find life hard enough at best, without being an unwelcome child in any home, and more so in a poverty-stricken one. Some have feared that if Birth Control knowledge were given to the world, there would be no more babies, and unbridled lust become rampant. People want homes and babies, but want them under proper conditions--the best conditions that our civilization makes possible, and restriction of propagation of the unfit is the first step in making a place for those of better birth. The 60 percent of our population who are of 13-year-old intellects breed proportionately faster than the normal 40 percent, because in them lust and nature take their course, without the restrictions of modern intelligence. From them come the vast armies of criminal and insane. Many of the 60 per cent do not know enough to take proper care of themselves, much less to care for their children, even when they have enough money, if intelligently expended, for a comfortable living, and the lack of money easily pushes them into the criminal class. Our first step in racial uplift is teaching Birth Control, thus limiting the unfit. The second is eugenics--the art of breeding up; teaching those fitted to bear children how to have the best babies possible; teaching them the advantages and disadvantages of heredity and of proper care and training of the child in the right kind of home. Lack of judicious home training is a large factor in the production of criminals. Who have a right to bear children? Any couple who want them, if they are healthy, intelligent and financially able to properly care for them. Sterilize those not fitted to propagate, and teach Birth Control, which leads to sacred motherhood and welcome children, and America shall lead the world.

3 Issue 2: Prohibition The following are excerpts from speeches and writings by officials and members of the AAPA (Association Against the Prohibition Amendment). "Excessive drinking among young people is a natural consequence of our prohibition laws. This is not evidence of depravity on their part, but a youthful reaction against the challenge of restraint. It is smart to drink. It is smart to carry a flask. Before prohibition the lad who took liquor on the hip to a party was almost unknown. Today he is a common figure." [from Henry H. Curran, "The Wet Side of Prohibition," New York Herald Tribune, 12 January 1926.] "If ninety per cent of our people must be protected against their own personal desires and inclinations by... the remaining ten per cent, the United States has ceased to be a Republic. The people do not govern themselves but are in the hands of dictators whose self-assumed superiority decide personal as well as public affairs." [from Pierre Du Pont, AAPA pamphlet, A Business Man's View of Prohibition, 1929.] "[Prohibition] discriminates between the rich and the poor. The former may... have stored away... an abundance of liquors, which the poor man was summarily denied by reason of his lack of money. Why should he be more a slave to... censorship... than his wealthy employer? Slavery was abolished... at the end of a bloody Civil War. Men were then taught the right to think and act as they might choose, so long as they invaded no other's rights, was a divine gift.... The poor man, as well as the rich, has the right to spend his own money as he pleases, and to choose his own diversions.... Slavery is the subjection to another's will or control. Must wage earners be groomed as oxen in the stall by their employers?" [from Henry S. Priest, AAPA spokesman, testimony at Congressional Hearings, 1926] "The Constitution inherited from our Fathers has been amended and mutilated.... Our Constitutional guarantees... have been violated. Sumptuary law (such as national prohibition) grants and withholds privileges upon a difference of religious belief. The right to govern ourselves in local affairs -- a right won by our ancestors in three generations of struggle -- is ignored." [from AAPA pamphlet, Some Existing Conditions and Their Causes 1922] "Not only have the American people done nothing to sustain the Bill of Rights and pass on to posterity a glorious heritage of self-dependence and manly action; not only have they witnessed without concern the progressive destruction, clause by clause, of the constitution; but, forgetting that a bill of rights is essentially a body of limitations imposed in justified distrust of power, they have... permitted their rulers... to confer upon themselves from the reserved mass of powers such accessions of authority as are fatal to any conception of limited government." [from Sterling E. Edmunds, "Mining and Sapping Our Bill of Rights," Virginia Law Review November 1929 (reprinted and distributed in pamphlet form).]

4 President Warren G. Harding's comments on morality and Prohibition enforcement, quoted in "The President's Appeal to Halt Law Breaking" Literary Digest April 15, There is a good deal of loose talk nowadays about the cause of the spiritual demoralization of the community, which it has become popular to attribute to the abnormal conditions that were incident to the war. But in fact the war is not wholly to blame. Before the war started or was dreamed of we were already realizing the tendency toward a certain moral laxity, a shifting of standards, a weakening of the sterner fibers. I think we should do well to recognize that intellectual and moral evolution of the community. It would be a grievous error to allow ourselves to feel too confident that this is only a temporary and passing aspect.... Whatever breeds disrespect for the law of the land, in any particular department of our community relations, is a force tending to the general breakdown of the social organization. If people who are known as leaders, as directing influences, as thoroughly respected and respectable members of society shall in their respective communities become known for their defiance of some part of the code of law, then they need not be astonished if presently they find that their example is followed by others, with the result that presently the law in general comes to be looked upon as a set of irksome and unreasonable restraints upon the liberty of the individual.... Our only safety will be in inculcating an attitude of respect for the law as, on the whole, the best expression that has been given to the social aspiration and moral purpose of the community....

5 Issue 3: Scopes Trial The editors of The Washington Post examined the question of state control over public schools that was a central legal issue in the Scopes Trial. Quoted in "Larger Aspects of the Dayton Trial." Literary Digest August 1, 1925: "A basic question of States' rights is involved in the Dayton trial. If a State may be denied the right to prescribe a course of study in the public schools, it may be deprived of all power over its school system. Under the pretext that a State might abuse its power by attempting to interfere with religion, all its powers might be swept away. But the courts stand as a barrier against such an attack upon State control of public schools. So long as the States remain within constitutional limitations, their control over public schools will not be abridged by any decision of the United States Supreme Court. "The Dayton trial is likely to furnish much enlightenment to lawyers as well as laymen on the subject of constitutional limitations. There is no unlimited power in the United States, except the power of the people. All agencies of government must function within bounds. What these bounds are in the case of State jurisdiction over public schools has not been fully determined, but it seems reasonable to assume that when a State prescribes a course of study for its public schools, which are supported by taxes imposed by the State, it can make any other course of study unlawful, even if a teacher violating the law should set up the defense that his theories were facts. Many facts exist which, if taught in the public schools, would subject the teacher to lynch law without further ado. "Can a State prescribe that the Bible or the Koran shall be used as a textbook in the public schools? There is nothing in the Constitution of the United States which denies that right to a State. The States and the people have great reserved powers, and this power to control the public schools is one of them."... The following passages, excerpted from "Dayton's 'Amazing' Trial," The Literary Digest, July 25, 1925: 5-7, demonstrate the religious views of both the author and the defender of the law that prompted the Scopes Trial. John W. Butler, the farmer legislator who fathered Tennessee's anti-evolution law explains that he introduced the bill because "the Bible is the foundation upon which our American Government is built and the teaching of any theory which denies that Bible will, I believe, destroy the principles which have made our nation what it is." [Butler says further:] "The teaching of this theory of evolution breaks the hearts of fathers and mothers who give their children the advantages of higher education in which they lose their respect for Christianity and become infidels. The evolutionists against whom the law is directed deny the immortality of the soul, the virgin birth of Christ, the resurrection of the body, and that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. If we are to exist as a nation the principles upon which our Government is founded must not be destroyed, which they surely would be if we became a nation of infidels, and we will become that very thing, a nation of infidels, when we set the Bible aside as being untrue and put evolution in its place."... Mr. Bryan, addressing the Progressive Dayton Club before the Scopes trial began, had this to say, as reported by the Associated Press: "What is the secret of the world's interest in this little case? It is found in the fact that this trial uncovers an attack which for a generation has been made more or less secretly upon revealed religion, that is, the Christian religion." "If evolution wins, Christianity goes. Not suddenly, of course, but gradually, for the two can not stand together. They are as antagonistic as light and darkness; as antagonistic as good and evil."...

6 Some members of the media tried to counter the caricatures that were being assigned to Tennesseans and provide a more accurate analysis of that part of the country. From "Dayton's 'Amazing' Trial," The Literary Digest, July 25, 1925: 5-7. The [New York Evening World] noting the tendency of some Northern journals to discuss Tennessee as a backward section not representative of the country as a whole, reminds us that it was in Tennessee that Thomas Jefferson found his warmest supporters at a time when he was being denounced as an infidel from the pulpits of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston because of his refusal to accept literally some of the stories of the Old Testament -- the adventure of Jonah and the whale, for instance, and the story of Noah and the flood. "Bigotry," declares The Evening World, "is not geographical nor confined to one place." "Tennesseans," remarks the New York Times, "are not so different from the rest of us that each group of them could not be duplicated in any part of the Union." To understand the influences behind Tennessee's anti-evolution law and the resultant trial of Mr. Scopes before the Dayton court, it is well to hear what Tennessee papers have to say. Many of them oppose this law. Thus The Southern Agriculturist, published in Nashville, declares that "we should feel ourselves faithless to the children of Tennessee, and of the other States in which similar laws are threatened, if we did not protest against it." According to J.W. Krutch, a Tennessean who discusses the trial in The Nation (New York), evolution in Tennessee has about the same status as elsewhere -- the majority of the population knows and cares nothing about it, one minority hates it and one accepts it. "Let the controversialists be heard and get the virus of the polemic poison out of their systems," advised the Knoxville Sentinel, which is convinced that neither religion nor science will suffer as a result. The Sentinel quotes with approval the following sentences from Frank R. Kent's Dayton dispatch to the Baltimore Sun: "It is easy enough to come out here and make fun of this evolution trial, but when you get here you do not want to do it. There is a sincere something at which it isn't pleasant to jeer. What it is, of course, is the religious sentiment of the people -- not the people you meet around town here, or those who drive you out from Chattanooga, show you the place and explain the background of the case, but the quiet people, the inarticulate people back in the country, in the mountains, on the farms and in the towns, too, whose lives center around the churches and who are past middle age." Mr. Kent reports that in Chattanooga "everybody agrees that from three-fourths to four-fifths of the citizens of Tennessee do not believe in the theory of evolution and do believe in the Biblical story of creation." The Sentinel thinks that these figures do not take into account "the numbers who sincerely believe both in the Bible and in evolution as not conflicting." "There are thousands of good men, scientists, preachers, teachers, and statesmen, who see no conflict in what science and the Bible teach as to the origin of man, albeit they do not accept Mr. Bryan's interpretation of Genesis," declares the Chattanooga Times.