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Femininity In The 1920's

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New media such as the film industry also gave men a “new definition” into the “male appearance” and its importance and variations in the public eye. Masculine appearance now rejected the clothed modesty of the Victorian Age, to the point that by 1930, men no longer wore swimming clothes that “covered the upper part of the body,” a celebration of the male physique and in many cases their sexuality that evolved through the 1920s. Instead of written rules and dictations of courtship, new social mores now declared that “the peer group” would now define “appropriate sexual behavior,” that courtship as a manner of relationships between men and women would now fade as the concept of dating would take its place. This “driving [of] courtship” into …show more content…

Recognizable for looser moral behavior, the flapper wore revealing clothing desiring a body type focused on androgyny and cut her hair into a short style framing the face. Typically found in urban areas and practiced by “young, single women,” the flapper forcibly distorted the divisions “between working class and middle class femininity,” yet this was not a purposeful social cause such as what led to the passage of the 19th Amendment. Concerned mostly with individual actions and rebellions, the flapper stayed “oblivious to the problems” of the 1920 and was not a “political identity” at all but rather a youth movement that did not include or consider the feminists of the previous decade that pushed for female suffrage; in fact not equate their “femininity with gender equality” in American society. As the Great Depression hit, however, the behavior of men and women changed drastically. This economic downturn led to a return to traditional forms of femininity with the safety of marriage, and though criticized under the eyes of “revolutionaries,” remained the unshakeable basis for American society until the 1960s. And yet American men and women in the Great Depression of the 1930s faced serious questions regarding their gender roles in marriage and the home as the crisis

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