Pt. I : The Two Faces of Women’s Rights One may think that in 1920, Suffragettes began to hang up their floral hats and picket signs in exchange for the short, boxy dresses of the Modern Woman considering new liberties at hand given to them by Modern Convenience and the ratified 19th Amendment- however, this is not the case. In fact, the two camps were separate- The Flapper and the Suffragette, as they both had different ideas on how to handle women’s issues- if they were interested at all. The Suffragette, usually the older woman of the two camps, as well as a practitioner of Victorian values, was a woman focused heavily on battling for political issues. These issues included prohibition, child labor, and Alice Paul’s 1923 Equal Rights Amendment …show more content…
Now that one knows what she was and was not, one can really begin to look deeper still into the roles she had played.
Pt. II : The Duality of the Flapper “ ‘If your mother caught us at this, we 'd certainly get our come-uppance!’ and Eunice became maternal, scrambled a terrifying number of eggs for them, kissed Babbitt on the ear, and in the voice of a brooding abbess marveled, ‘It beats the devil why feminists like me still go on nursing these men!’ ” (Lewis, Ch.32). [Sic].
The above quoted conversation, an excerpt from Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, offers a quick glimpse into the subject of this particular section- the duality of the Flapper Girl. This hot and spunky firecracker, this Eunice Littlefield in this single paragraph embodies it all- she simultaneously moves forward while staying in the same place. On one hand, Eunice shows clearly that she cares not for the moral restrictions given by a previous generation (her mother, namely) and views herself as a progressive- though she simultaneously abides, still, by the rules of this same predecessor (she acts ‘maternal’ and cooks for the male-