American Women In The 1920s

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Hastened by the Civil War, the years after and leading up to WWI found the United States in the throws of dramatic social change. The shift to an industrial society, city expansion, immigration and a growing consumer culture all played a major role in the reexaminations of cultural and political practices. At the forefront of the changes was a crisis about individualism. The achievement of the individual was becoming difficult to see with the rise of bigger corporations and rapid industrialization. This brought up the question of how to judge individual achievement in the face of a society where it was increasingly difficult to judge. This incorporation of American was one of the major issues of the progressive …show more content…

The urban political leaders cared little for their followers excepted for gaining votes so that while they sometimes sympathized, it was rarely genuine. In essence “machine coalitions reinforced the power of the capital by blocking pressures from below that might challenge its hegemony. It was in this situation that women found the perfect environment to focus the advancement of their agenda. In 1870 many women’s groups were formed with one of the most important being the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (the WCTU). Twenty-five of its thirty-nine departments dealt with non-temperance issues and created huge opportunities for the previous disenfranchised, including many recent immigrants. Happening at the same time was a rise in women’s education and by the 1890’s many were putting their education to good use. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs (the GFWC) emerged as the secular arm of the …show more content…

While arguably one of the most important times in American history, it is also the most complex. We can find the progressive tradition in eff3ct to this very day in groups like the NAACP and NOW. Though we know that they have shaped the future, we do not know the reason behind their beginning. Pro-progressives show a guiding light, except to say that those before were biased. The elitist progressive do not show many pearls of wisdom but they have put forth aside from new facts that support recent historians in bashing the old. To gain a total understanding more research needs to be done in this area and until then, the real reasons behind the Progressive movement will remain within the elitist progressive