Church and Family IV: The Family in Late Industrial Society

Extract

In the United States it was the year 1921 that marked the culmination of the era of Victorian feminism. Women finally won the right to vote that gave them the official status of public citizens in the American Republic, after an eighty-eight year struggle that began in the 1840s with the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. But this culmination of Victorian feminism also marked its rapid demise as well. The Victorian domestic culture of female moral superiority and sisterly bonding gave way to the more eroticized world of the 1920s. The daughters of the suffragettes became the flappers of the “Roaring Twenties”, who were embarrassed by the moralistic culture of their mothers, with their large hats and long white dresses. Women, it seemed, had won access to the male promised land of education, politics and business, and even the male world of sexual pleasure, and now it was only a question of entering into and taking possession of it.