Time Travel To 1920's

By Madlyn M

Joshua Zeitz once said, “(…) the New Woman of the 1920s boldly asserted her right to dance, drink, smoke, and date—to work her own property, to live free of the strictures that governed her mother’s generation. (…) She flouted Victorian-era conventions and scandalized her parents. In many ways, she controlled her own destiny.”Joshua is explaining the common woman in the 1920s, they were the exact opposite of the generation before them, their mother. The 1920s would be an era that I would travel back in time to because it was an age for change with music, dramatic social and political change, and the uprising of the rebelling against the moral restrictions of past generations.

Music gave the Black Americans a new way of life. New dance moves came about, Jazz music came out, and people were more open about how they danced and how they acted in public. The 1920s was known as the Jazz age, the music was a wilder and freer type of music. Jazz reflects the decade because Americans lives were getting to be freer and more concerned with having fun. Jazz reflected the way people lived in this decade. Jazz was also very influential because Black Americans were at the forefront of Jazz, so when the caucasians started to enjoy the Jazz music, it brought different cultures and ethnicities together.

Music was becoming more and more popular throughout the nation, but there was also a dramatic social change and political change for woman. Women were more commonly known as “flappers” in the 1920s. A flapper is a young woman with bobbed hair and short skirts who drank, smoked, and said what might be termed “unladylike” things, in addition to being more sexually “free” than previous generations. Women were not known as the stay home moms whose only purpose in life was to be the host for the baby and keep their husband happy,  women started to become more independent with the help of their new jobs. Millions of women worked in white-collar jobs. Women were becoming more independent. With the help of new technology, women’s lives started to become more independent. They invented the washing machine, vacuum and even birth control, so women could have fewer children.

Women started to not only become more independent, but also started an uprising from the past generations. Young adults, especially college students, started to challenged traditional notions of proper behavior. Buoyed by the decade’s prosperity, young people threw loud parties, drank illegal liquor, and danced new, sexual steps at jazz clubs. Sex started to become a more open topic which led to sex-before-marriage being more common. Female sexuality was less suppressed, skirt hems were worn higher, and makeup became more common.

The nation’s total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, and this economic growth swept many Americans into buying more things. People from coast to coast bought the same goods, listened to the same music, did the same dances, and even used the same slang! Many Americans were uncomfortable with this new, urban lifestyle; in fact, for many people in the United States, the 1920s brought more conflict than celebration. However, for a small handful of young people in the nation’s big cities, the 1920s were roaring indeed. If I could travel back in time, I would chose the 1920s, due to the change in music, dramatic social and political change, and the uprising of  the rebelling against the moral restrictions of past generations.