by Gail Collins
“IF I SHOULD BOP OFF, IT’LL BE DOING
THE THING THAT I’VE ALWAYS MOST WANTED”
In the 1920s, most American families acquired cars, and there was no real question whether women would be allowed in the driver’s seat—that had been resolved by the previous generation. Women had been getting driver’s licenses since 1899, and in 1905, three Los Angeles women made news with a “sensational cross-country run” in which they made the ninety-five-mile drive to Santa Barbara in under ten hours. The Motor Girls series for young readers arrived in bookstores in 1910, quickly followed by The Motor Maids and the Automobile Girls. (The author of one series, a Mrs. Penrose, was said to be both an “able writer” and an “expert automobilist.”) The Outdoor Girls added driving to their other accomplishments.
But early automobiles were tough for women, let alone girls, to handle. Getting a car going and keeping it on the road required considerable strength, dexterity, and a willingness to get down in the mud and change the fragile tires, which seldom lasted long between punctures. Starting the early model cars was an arduous process that required the driver to turn a crank on the front of the engine while fiddling with a wire that served as the clutch. Then he or she had to race back to the driver’s seat in time to turn on the ignition so it would “catch.” Many men found it difficult, especially because the cars stalled out on a regular basis. Woman had the additional burden of long skirts, and one of the first complaints about female drivers was that they tended to wait along the side of the road for a man to stop and help when their car needed restarting. But by the twenties, the crank starter was pretty much obsolete, and women were getting behind the wheel as a matter of course. They ferried children to music lessons or visits to the dentist; they shopped for groceries and picked up their husbands at the train station after work. Ads for the Model T announced that “More than ever—the Ford is a woman’s car.”
Young readers who got tired of all those heroines in automobiles may have followed the adventures of the Flying Girls, starring Orissa Kane (“self-reliant and full of sparkling good nature”), who flew around with her brother, a more reckless pilot who frequently had to be rescued. Judging by the book’s jacket, Orissa’s airplane resembled a flimsy glider. Early aviation was another one of those enterprises that was so disorganized it was easy for women to get involved. In the beginning, anybody who had enough nerve could take to the sky. In 1903, Aida de Acosta, a young Cuban American, was vacationing in Paris with her mother when she got a look at some dirigibles. After three lessons of flight instruction, she became the first woman to fly a powered aircraft alone—months before the Wright brothers took off at Kitty Hawk. In 1910, Bessica Raiche built a plane inside her house over a long western winter and then flew it after getting just enough instruction to know how to make it go up and down.
Bessie Coleman, known as “Brave Bessie,” was one of the few African Americans in early flight. She heard returning World War I veterans talk about flying while she worked as a manicurist in a Chicago barbershop. When she discovered blacks were barred from American flight schools, she went to Paris. Back in America, she became a stunt pilot in a flying circus, one of a number of women barnstormers who flew from town to town in the twenties. Female daredevils danced the Charleston on an airplane wing as it flew over the crowd, or took the helm to fly loops and take gawking townspeople on rides. All these exploits in extremely primitive aircrafts were obviously very dangerous. Harriet Quimby, the first licensed American female pilot, died in a crash in Boston only three months after she flew across the English channel. Bessie Coleman fell to her death when her plane rolled over in the air while she was not wearing a seat belt. However, Jessie Woods, another pioneer barnstormer and airplane wing-walker, lived to perform her trick again in an air show in 1991, when she was eighty-two.
Amelia Earhart was the most famous woman in flight. A former mechanic, barnstormer, and social worker, she became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic in 1928, then spent the next few years trying to explain that her only role had been to sit as a passenger “like a sack of potatoes.” She finally did fly the Atlantic solo in 1932, to international acclaim. The younger generation adored her athleticism, her boyish good looks, and her confident ease in handling the media. Their parents appreciated her social-worker sensibility and refusal to smoke or drink. In 1937, she and her navigator disappeared during an attempted flight around the world, and although they were clearly killed, her fans never stopped theorizing about ways she might have survived on a deserted island or been captured as a spy by the Japanese. “If I should bop off, it’ll be doing the thing that I’ve always most wanted to do,” she told a friend before her departure.
SWIM GIRL, SWIM
Tanned skin became fashionable for the first time in the 1920s, deeply confusing the cosmetic industry, which had always believed that the lighter, the better. But tans no longer meant you were so poor you had to labor outdoors. They suggested leisure, golf games, and tennis. The swimsuit and tennis dress were the defining clothes of the era, and as the decade went along, they got increasingly skimpy. Helen Wills, a popular tennis player known as “Little Miss Poker Face,” began wearing short skirts and sleeveless blouses on the court, arguing that they made it easier for her to play. Her fans followed suit, although many of them could not bear to relinquish their nylon stockings and simply put socks on over them.
One of the most famous athletes of the twenties was Gertrude Ederle, an Olympic swimmer who astonished the world in 1926 when, at age nineteen, she swam the English Channel—twenty-one miles of freezing water inhabited by jellyfish and the occasional shark. Only five men had ever done it before her, and she did it faster, following a boat filled with her family and supporters, who urged her on by singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” Although Ederle came of age when women were expected to be active, almost no one thought them capable of heroic feats of physical endurance. But when she pulled it off, the world was thrilled, and Americans welcomed the daughter of German immigrants back to New York with a ticker tape parade. She got all the trappings of twentieth-century American celebrity, including a role as herself in the 1927 movie Swim Girl, Swim and a vaudeville tour in which she performed in a huge collapsible swimming pool. But water damage to her eardrums during the Channel swim eventually destroyed her hearing, and she suffered a back injury that forced her to spend four years in a cast. In 1928, Ederle had a nervous breakdown, but she recovered her emotional balance and became a swimming coach for deaf children.
Ederle’s feat inspired tens of thousands of women to earn Red Cross swimming certificates, and when they went in the water, modesty no longer required that they be weighed down by their clothing. The bathing suit underwent drastic changes. The older generation was still wearing multilayered models that concealed every possible inch of skin, from the neck to the bathing shoes, and a number of towns had ordinances requiring women to keep their arms and legs covered at the beach. But once flappers started baring their arms and legs on downtown streets, they turned up at the swimming pool in sleeveless one-piece suits without skirts. When the first Miss America contest was held in 1921, the audience gasped and applauded when the girls marched onstage in the latest swimwear. The organizers did their best to suggest that the pageant was being conducted in the spirit of athleticism rather than exhibitionism—in 1922, the New York City contingent of entrants arrived in a seaplane, swimming their way to shore. Still, the contest was canceled from 1928 to 1935 because some Atlantic City hotel owners complained that their customers found it immoral.
“THE REASON NOBODY WILL GIVE”
In 1929, at the end of one of the most incredible runs of prosperity in history, 59 percent of American families still could not make enough money for even a minimal standard of living. A survey of black women workers found that only 13.6 percent worked an eight-hour day or less, while 40 percent worked ten or more hours. African American women of middle age or younger in the North had approx
imately the same literacy rate as white women their age and were just as likely to send their children to school. But the payoff was much lower for black students. Even those with high school degrees were shut out of clerical and sales jobs in white neighborhoods. Employers refused to hire black women, even though they were better educated and worked for less than the pool of available whites. (Addie Hunter, a graduate of an excellent high school in Boston, fought for years to find a white-collar job but wound up working in a factory. “Color—the reason nobody will give, the reason nobody is required to give, will always be in the way,” she concluded.) Part of the reason was the demand by white workers for total segregation, which meant the expense of separate bathrooms and lunchrooms. Inevitably, most black women wound up in domestic service. African Americans were about a fourth of the domestics in 1900 and half by 1930. Employment agencies went through the South offering jobs and transportation to women who were willing to come north and work as servants.
Partly as a result of the demand for female domestic workers, most of the 750,000 blacks who moved north in the 1920s were women. There was a sexual imbalance in many black neighborhoods—in New York City there were 10 women for every 8.5 men. Black women’s lives were both very similar and very different from those of white immigrant women who shared their economic class. Black wives were five times more likely to work than any other ethnic group, and they had fewer children than immigrants. Unlike immigrants, black parents allowed their working children to keep the money they made, and they were less likely to expect their sons and daughters to support them in old age.
Black women were very much constrained by the Jim Crow segregation rules of the era and the awareness that most whites regarded them as, in the words of Marita Bonner, a young black writer, “only a gross collection of desires, all uncontrolled.” Unlike white women her age, Bonner said, she could not travel alone to another city, lest she give the impression of being a loose woman. Although there continued to be an elite group of black families who had made their fortunes in an earlier, less structured economy, the opportunities of breaking through to the middle class for ambitious newcomers were minimal. Even the black cosmetics business was being taken over by white men, some of whom created fictional black women to serve as the company symbol. Madam Mamie Hightower was supposedly the head of the Golden Brown Beauty Company, but she was actually the wife of the company porter. When Madam C. J. Walker died, her company was run by men, and although they were African American, they began to market the skin lighteners she had always refused to endorse. One much-publicized but very narrow avenue to real all-American success for black women was the world of entertainment, and the one area of entertainment in particular was music. In 1920, Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” was selling 8,000 records a week, setting off a craze for black female singers that extended through the decade. Bessie Smith saved Columbia Records in its infancy by selling 6 million records in six years.
“IF I WERE BORN 100 YEARS FROM NOW,
WELL AND GOOD”
The question of whether women should work had been settled as decisively as the one about them driving, and people seemed rather pleased with the notion that the spunky American girl, compact in one hand and automobile wheel in the other, was ready for anything. “Within the space of a single day, one can ride in a taxi driven by a woman, directed by traffic signals designed by a woman, to the office of a woman engineer, there to look out of the window and observe a woman steeplejack at her trade…” enthused the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences in 1929. But the lady steeplejack was more an example of the twenties’ love affair with stunts and oddities than the beginning of a trend. The proportion of women in the workforce was actually lower in 1930 than it had been in 1910, and women professionals were concentrated almost entirely in four areas—teaching, nursing, social work, and libraries. Dr. Lillian Walsh, a longtime practitioner, concluded sadly that women doctors had become as fashionable as “a horse and buggy.” Any woman ready to announce that she was trading in her law books for a cookbook could find a ready market for her memoirs in the women’s magazines.
For most women, work was a brief interlude between school and marriage. They made much less than men; in 1927, the average weekly wage for a man was $29.35 and for a woman it was $17.34. Women were also likely to be overqualified for the work they could get. One writer in the Atlantic, surveying the business world, concluded that the boss’s secretary was more likely to be a college graduate than he was. Although there were plenty of poor women and single mothers who depended on their paychecks, society generally liked to think of the working girl as a young thing saving money to fill her hope chest. “I pay our women well so they can dress attractively and get married,” said Henry Ford.
The idea that women would not get married had gone out of style. Girls at Barnard or Vassar might be daring enough to think that they could wait until they were twenty-five or even—perhaps—thirty. But now that Americans had been convinced that women needed sex, the idea that they might march into middle age without husbands began to look either pathetic or sinister. Vassar started offering courses in “Motherhood” and “Husband and Wife.” F. Scott Fitzgerald had one of his heroines complain that to attract suitors she has to “descend to their level and let them patronize my intellect.” It never occurs to her to drop the boring dunces and support herself: “If I were born 100 years from now, well and good, but now what’s in store for me—I have to marry, that goes without saying.”
Only about 10 percent of women kept their jobs after marriage, and most were working-class wives who could not afford to quit. Even within the elite women’s colleges, attempts to combine family and careers were mostly confined to those who opted for work and childless marriages. But a great many more women were dissatisfied with their choices. They embarked on a discussion about “having it all” that would continue for the rest of the century. “There must be a way out and it is the problem of our generation to find the way,” said the Smith College Weekly.
16
The Depression:
Ma Perkins and Eleanor Roosevelt
“ROMANCE CAN BEGIN AT THIRTY-FIVE”
When NBC radio moved into the vast new Rockefeller Center in 1932, Margaret Cuthbert, the head of the women’s division, outlined the “great possibilities” she imagined might be achieved at the new address. Daytime radio, she wrote hopefully, “might become a great national headquarters for women,” bringing improving lectures, university extension courses, and cultural programs to the housewives of America. Of course, nothing of the sort happened. The daytime hours were devoted to women, but in the form of soap operas—fifteen-minute daily serials that investigated whether Our Gal Sunday, “a girl from a little mining town in the West,” could find happiness “as the wife of a wealthy and titled Englishman.” (Not usually.) They followed Mary Noble, Backstage Wife, and Helen Trent’s attempt to prove “what so many women long to prove, that because a woman is thirty-five, or more, romance in life need not be over, that romance can begin at thirty-five.” By 1936, more than half of the daytime programming was made up of long-running melodramas, in which the characters wrestled with domestic woes and occasionally commented on the fine quality of the sponsor’s laundry detergent.
That soap operas became a central feature in the lives of millions of American women so quickly was a tribute to how lonely and boring housework had always been. Mary Knackstedt Dyck, a Kansas farm wife who kept a family diary at her windswept Depression-era home, included the developments in the lives of soap opera characters as faithfully as she did those of her husband, who was always at work, and her children, who had moved away. In October 1936, after recording that she was mending her husband’s trousers, she added, “Bob is making plans to get his Marriage Lisense tomorrow”—an apparent reference to a development on Betty and Bob, a radio drama about a secretary who marries her boss. Mrs. Dyck knew the characters weren’t real (although some women never grasped that and sent weddin
g gifts or baby presents whenever a soap opera heroine got married or pregnant). But they were a central part of her existence, more reliable company than her grown offspring or preoccupied husband. Though her life in the center of the Depression-era Dust Bowl had plenty of sorrows, nothing seemed to bring Mrs. Dyck down like static on the radio.
Critics were as appalled by the soap operas as they had been by the women’s novels of the pre–Civil War period, even though in this case many of the scripts were written by men. (Echoing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s complaint about the “scribbling women,” William Faulkner wrote crankily from Hollywood: “I seem to be out of touch with the Kotex Age here.”) The radio soaps did have some similarities with the weepy fiction of that earlier era, only one of which was a lack of immortal prose. Many soap opera heroines had careers they had begun in response to a crisis—like the ever-wise Ma Perkins, who took over the family lumberyard when her husband died, or Mary Marlin, who assumed her husband’s Senate seat when his plane disappeared over Siberia. In the more action-oriented soaps, the emergencies could reach epic proportions. The actress who played Stella Dallas recalled that when Stella’s daughter was kidnapped by a sheik, “I had to go to the Sahara Desert and try to save her. On the way I saved a lot of people from a train wreck. Then I was trapped in a submarine at the bottom of the Suez Canal.”
