A Girl’s World in Twenties America. Cautious what you would like for, nostalgia… | by Jeff Miller

Cautious what you would like for, nostalgia buffs

Blind nostalgia for the Nineteen Fifties afflicts many People, a few of whom weren’t round to expertise that period’s crushing conformity and chauvinism. Regardless of. It’s sufficient, they are saying, that males have been women and men have been ladies. All people knew their place and the standard nuclear household reigned supreme.

But when that’s your excellent, why cease there? Why not return to the even fiercer traditionalism of the Twenties as an alternative?

Whereas jazz-loving flappers with bobbed hair and “unfastened morals” are the favored stereotypes of the period, most middle-class ladies within the Twenties stuffed their time with cooking, child-rearing, golf equipment, social gatherings, housekeeping, and recipe sharing.

My paternal grandmother, a 32-year-old housewife with two younger sons when Warren G. Harding was elected president in 1920, exemplified that conventional way of life. I do know this as a result of she left behind a binder filled with newspaper articles and bulletins, letters, private notes, recipes, occasion planning recommendation, birthday playing cards, and an extended checklist of different ephemera.

The artifacts ship a transparent message. For all of the cultural modifications that outlined the Twenties — be they a lady’s proper to vote, the emergence of girls medical doctors and entrepreneurs, or widespread movie sirens flaunting their…