Flappers, Jazz, and Social Change: 1920s American Culture

On a steamy night in August 1925, a young woman walked into a Harlem nightclub in a beaded dress that ended just below her knees, her hair shorn close to her skull, a long cigarette holder between her painted lips. She ordered a cocktail — a Bee’s Knees, made of gin, lemon, and honey — and stepped out onto the dance floor to do the Charleston. Twenty years earlier, a woman wearing such a dress, with such a haircut, drinking such a drink, in a public nightclub with mixed company, would have been considered scandalous. By 1925, she was the new American woman.

The Roaring Twenties were the first American decade that felt genuinely modern. Between 1920 and 1929, the country completed its long break with the Victorian era, the moral code that had governed American life since the Civil War. The change was visible everywhere: in women’s hair and hemlines, in the music spilling from dance halls and phonographs, in the cocktail shakers of illegal bars, in the front seats of automobiles where young couples sat unchaperoned, in the rising skyscrapers of New York and Chicago, in the magazines that promised a new life of glamour and consumption. Whether one called the era the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, the Années folles, or simply “the decade,” the meaning was the same: the older America of horse-drawn carriages, parlors, and Protestant restraint was giving way to something faster, louder, and far more uncertain.

It traces the major currents — the new morality, the rise of youth culture, the lost generation of expatriate writers, the music of jazz, the great experiment of Prohibition, the flowering of Black culture in Harlem, the arrival of mass entertainment, and the cultural battles of the 1920s — and connects them to the deeper transformations that defined the modern United States. For a deeper look at any of these threads, the flapper movement, the jazz age music scene, and the story of Prohibition and speakeasies are all explored in dedicated sections.

The Break with the Victorian Era

To understand the 1920s, one has to understand what came before. The Victorian era — the long period of Anglo-American culture named for the British Queen Victoria (1837–1901) — had imposed a strict moral code on American life, especially for women. The ideal Victorian woman was pious, pure, domestic, and sexually innocent. She wore a corset, long skirts, and piled-up hair. She did not smoke, drink, or work outside the home. She deferred to her father before marriage and her husband after. Her job was to be the moral anchor of the household and the guardian of her children’s virtue.

By 1920, this ideal was in retreat. The First World War had done much to dismantle it. More than 350,000 American women had served in the war effort, both as volunteers overseas and as industrial workers at home. Nurses like Helen Fairchild, who died of disease in France in 1918, and the telephone operators known as the “Hello Girls” had proven that women could perform demanding work under extreme conditions. Millions of women had also entered the workforce in the war’s industrial boom, replacing the men who had gone to fight. When the men came home, the women did not all retreat willingly back to the kitchen.

The Nineteenth Amendment, ratified on August 18, 1920, gave American women the vote. The 1920 presidential election, in which Warren G. Harding defeated James M. Cox in a landslide, was the first in which women could vote in every state. For the older generation of suffragists, this was the culmination of a seventy-year fight. For their younger daughters, it was the starting gun for something much larger.

The New Morality and the Birth of Youth Culture

What followed was not just a political change but a cultural earthquake. The 1920s produced the first genuine youth culture in American history — a separate world of music, fashion, slang, and behavior defined not by parents but by teenagers and people in their early twenties. The flapper — the iconic young woman of the 1920s — is examined in detail in the flapper movement, but the broader phenomenon deserves attention here. For the first time, young Americans had their own money (often from new office jobs), their own entertainments (dance halls, movie palaces, roadsters), their own music (jazz), and their own moral code, which held that personal pleasure was not only permissible but expected.

The “new morality” of the 1920s was real, but it was also exaggerated. Surveys of the period suggest that actual sexual behavior changed less than the rhetoric implied; the average age of first marriage in 1920 was about 21 for women and 24 for men, and the great majority of young Americans still married. What changed most visibly were appearances: the short hair, the short skirts, the visible makeup, the public smoking, the public drinking, the unchaperoned dating, and the frank talk about sex in novels, magazines, and even mainstream newspapers. The “new woman” smoked Lucky Strikes, danced the Charleston, drove her own car, and worked in a department store or a downtown office — a constellation of behaviors that would have shocked her mother and would soon be imitated around the world.

This shift generated fierce backlash. Ministers, doctors, and politicians warned of a “moral decline.” Magazine editors published anxious essays on “The Modern Girl” and “Why Our Girls Are Going Wrong.” The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, which at its peak claimed four million members, presented itself as the defender of traditional Protestant American womanhood against the triple threat of the flapper, the immigrant, and the African American. Yet the new morality could not be reversed. By the end of the decade, the flapper silhouette, the cocktail, and the radio were established features of American life, and the country that had voted in 1920 was not the same country that would vote in 1928.

The Writers Who Defined the Era

Every cultural moment needs its chroniclers, and the 1920s produced a remarkable generation of American writers. Their work did not just describe the decade — it invented it. The names we now use for the era — Jazz Age, Roaring Twenties, Lost Generation, the “American Mercury” circle — all came from this small group of journalists, novelists, and critics.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was the decade’s poet laureate. After the success of his 1920 debut novel This Side of Paradise, he became the chronicler of flappers and their wealthy suitors. He coined the term “Jazz Age” in 1921 and used it as the subtitle of his 1922 story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. His 1925 masterpiece The Great Gatsby — set on the wealthy Long Island shore in the summer of 1922 — became the defining novel of the decade, the book against which all subsequent American fictions of wealth and longing have been measured. Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda were, in many ways, the first American celebrity couple, photographed for magazines and written about in gossip columns for their drinking, their fights, and their expatriate adventures in France.

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956), the Baltimore journalist who edited The American Mercury and the Smart Set, was the decade’s most influential critic. A self-described “agnostic” in an era of Protestant moralism, Mencken used his pen to ridicule Prohibition, the Ku Klux Klan, fundamentalist Christianity, and what he called the “booboisie” — his sardonic name for the American middle class. He coined or popularized dozens of phrases still in use, including “the horse race” for political coverage and “the Bible Belt” for the conservative South and Midwest.

Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature when he received the award in 1930. His 1920 novel Main Street satirized the small-town pettiness of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota (a stand-in for his hometown of Sauk Centre), and his 1922 novel Babbitt invented a new word for middle-class conformity. Lewis’s subjects were, in many ways, the targets of the 1920s cultural revolution: provincial businessmen, narrow-minded ministers, smug Rotarians. By taking them seriously as literary subjects, he made the rest of the country take them seriously as well.

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), John Dos Passos (1896–1970), William Faulkner (1897–1962), Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950), Dorothy Parker (1893–1967), and Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953) all did their breakthrough work in the 1920s. Hemingway’s spare, masculine prose in The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) defined a new style of American writing. Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) opened the fictional world of Yoknapatawpha County. Millay’s poetry and Parker’s short stories gave voice to the new urban, bohemian woman.

The Lost Generation in Paris

Not all of the decade’s writers stayed home. A significant contingent — the so-called Lost Generation — emigrated to Europe, especially Paris, in the 1920s. The phrase came from Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), the American novelist who had lived in Paris since 1903 and who, in conversation with Hemingway, reportedly said of another car full of young men: “You are all a lost generation.” Hemingway used the phrase as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises and the label stuck.

The Lost Generation writers were mostly middle-class Americans, often wounded in body or spirit by the war, who had decided that American provincialism, materialism, and Prohibition were too much to bear. They clustered in the Latin Quarter of Paris, especially in the cheap hotels and cafés of the Rue de l’Odéon and the Rue Mouffetard. Hemingway and his first wife Hadley lived there in the early 1920s, as did F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, e.e. cummings (1894–1962), and Hart Crane (1899–1932). They drank heavily, quarreled, wrote, sent their manuscripts to American magazines, and made themselves famous through the New York tabloids, which sent reporters across the Atlantic to chronicle their drinking and their love affairs.

The expatriate experience was not universal, and it was not always liberating. Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) is in part a portrait of a group of American and English expatriates in Pamplona, Spain, drinking themselves toward a kind of despair. The Lost Generation writers were, in the end, more successful as witnesses to the failures of the American 1920s than as critics of them. They were, in this sense, a product of the same forces they described.

Jazz: The Sound of a Decade

If one sound came to define the 1920s, it was jazz. Born in the port city of New Orleans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — a hybrid of African rhythms, blues, ragtime, gospel, brass-band marches, and Caribbean influences — jazz had spread north with the Great Migration, the movement of roughly one million African Americans out of the rural South between 1910 and 1930. The full story of jazz age music is treated in detail elsewhere, but its cultural importance in the 1920s cannot be overstated.

By the mid-1920s, jazz had conquered Chicago (where Louis Armstrong arrived in 1922 to join his mentor King Oliver’s band), New York (where the cotton club and other Harlem venues made stars of Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway), and Kansas City. The 1924 premiere of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” at New York’s Aeolian Hall, performed by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, was a kind of public coronation: the moment jazz, or at least a symphonic version of it, was admitted to the concert hall. By 1929, jazz was the most popular music in America, and its rhythms had reshaped popular song.

For many white Americans, jazz was thrilling precisely because it felt dangerous. H.L. Mencken called it “the anthropology of the future.” Religious groups denounced it as the devil’s music. Some saw its African and Caribbean rhythms as racially suspect; others saw the sexual frankness of its lyrics and its association with alcohol, dancing, and nightclubs as morally suspect. The 1920s debate over jazz was, in many ways, a proxy for the larger debate over race, immigration, and the place of older moral authorities in modern American life.

The most important figures in 1920s jazz were African American, even though most of them worked under severe racial restrictions. Louis Armstrong (1901–1971), born in poverty in New Orleans, was the decade’s most important soloist; his recordings with the Hot Five and Hot Seven between 1925 and 1928 set a new standard for jazz improvisation. Bessie Smith (1894–1937), the “Empress of the Blues,” was the most popular blues singer of the decade. Duke Ellington (1899–1974) built a band that would define the sound of the Cotton Club and, eventually, of American popular music. Bix Beiderbecke (1903–1931), a white cornetist from Iowa, helped invent a cooler, more lyrical style of jazz that influenced the next decade’s swing. The same forces that made jazz America’s music also made it a target of the decade’s culture wars, and the Harlem nightclubs of the 1920s were at the center of that controversy.

Prohibition and the Speakeasy

On January 17, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution took effect, banning the manufacture, sale, and transportation of “intoxicating liquors” throughout the country. The Volstead Act, which had been passed over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto in October 1919, defined the prohibited beverages and gave the federal government the power to enforce the new law. The era of Prohibition had begun, a social experiment that, depending on the speaker, was either a noble act of national moral reform or a disaster of unintended consequences. Its full history, including the speakeasy culture that arose in response, is treated in detail elsewhere.

The first effect of Prohibition was to make drinking more popular than ever. Thousands of speakeasies — illegal bars hidden behind unmarked doors, reached by whispered passwords — opened in cities and small towns. The New York Police Department estimated that by the late 1920s, there were between 30,000 and 100,000 speakeasies in New York City alone. Many of them were more elaborate, more glamorous, and more expensive than the saloons they had replaced. They also made criminals rich. Al Capone of Chicago, Lucky Luciano of New York, Owney Madden of Kansas City, and dozens of lesser gangsters built multimillion-dollar empires on the profits of illegal liquor, while corrupting the police, the courts, and the politicians who were supposed to enforce the law.

The cultural consequences were equally significant. The cocktail, born in the late nineteenth century, became a national institution in the 1920s. Bartenders, now called “mixologists,” competed to create elaborate new drinks — the Bee’s Knees, the Sidecar, the French 75, the Tom Collins — that disguised the harsh taste of the bathtub gin and homemade whiskey that made up most of what was being served. Women who would never have entered a saloon now drank cocktails in speakeasies beside men, and the cocktail party became a central ritual of 1920s social life. The cigarette, too, took on a new meaning: in 1929, the publicist Edward Bernays organized a publicity stunt in which young women marched down Fifth Avenue in New York lighting up cigarettes as part of his “Torches of Freedom” campaign on behalf of the American Tobacco Company, recasting the cigarette as a symbol of female emancipation.

Prohibition also shaped the music of the decade. Jazz flourished in the speakeasies and nightclubs of Chicago and New York, where thirsty crowds paid high prices to drink and dance. Many of the most important early jazz recordings were made in studios that doubled as speakeasies or in recording sessions hastily arranged to capture the music of bands that played in them. The decade’s biggest stars, from Armstrong to Ellington, owed much of their early audience to Prohibition.

The Harlem Renaissance

The most consequential cultural development of the 1920s for African Americans was the Harlem Renaissance, the extraordinary flowering of Black literature, music, art, and scholarship centered in upper Manhattan in the 1920s and 1930s. (Its full scope is explored in the Harlem Renaissance section.) It is a mistake to think of the Harlem Renaissance as a single movement; it was a constellation of overlapping circles of writers, painters, musicians, and intellectuals who shared a sense that Black Americans were creating a new, distinctly modern, and distinctly African American culture.

In literature, the period produced Langston Hughes (1901–1967), whose poetry and short stories depicted the everyday life of working-class Black Americans with unprecedented honesty and beauty; Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), whose novels Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) drew on the folk culture of her native Eatonville, Florida; Jean Toomer (1894–1967), whose 1923 book Cane mixed poetry, fiction, and drama in a new way; and Countee Cullen (1903–1946), a poet of classical elegance. W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) and Alain Locke (1885–1954) provided intellectual leadership, with Locke’s 1925 anthology The New Negro serving as a kind of manifesto for the movement.

In music, the Cotton Club (open 1923–1940) and the Savoy Ballroom (open 1926) were the central venues. The Cotton Club, despite being a whites-only establishment, was the site where Ellington’s orchestra became a national sensation. Florence Mills (1896–1927), Ethel Waters (1896–1977), and Adelaide Hall (1901–1993) became the first African American women to achieve Broadway stardom. In art, Aaron Douglas (1899–1979) created a distinctive visual style that combined African and modernist elements. The Harmon Foundation sponsored annual exhibitions of Black art from 1927 to 1933.

The Harlem Renaissance was not without its internal tensions. Some, like Du Bois, wanted art that would uplift the race and refute white stereotypes; others, like Hurston, resisted this goal and wanted to depict Black life without didactic purpose. Hughes in particular was attacked for his working-class subjects, his frank treatment of sexuality, and his refusal to write “respectable” poetry. The movement also could not escape the brutal racial realities of the 1920s. The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, in which a white mob destroyed the prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood, killing as many as 300 people, was a reminder that the decade’s cultural openness was not evenly distributed. Nevertheless, the writers, musicians, and artists of the Harlem Renaissance fundamentally reshaped American culture and laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-twentieth century.

Mass Entertainment: Radio, Movies, and Sports

The 1920s were also the decade in which American entertainment became a mass industry. The 1920s saw the rise of the three media that would dominate American leisure for the rest of the century: radio, the motion picture, and the professional spectator sport.

Radio transformed American life in less than a decade. The first commercial broadcast in the United States is generally considered to have been made by station KDKA in Pittsburgh on November 2, 1920, reporting the results of the Harding-Cox presidential election. By 1929, about 12 million American households — roughly 40 percent of all homes — owned a radio. The first national networks, NBC (founded 1926) and CBS (founded 1927), brought the same programs to every corner of the country, and the shows they broadcast — Amos ‘n’ Andy, the Goldbergs, the Lux Radio Theatre — became the shared cultural reference of the nation. The full history of radio broadcasting in the 1920s is treated separately, but its cultural impact in the 1920s was immediate: families gathered around the set in the evening the way they had once gathered around the parlor piano, and they listened to the same music, the same news, the same comedy routines.

Movies were already a mass medium in 1920, but the 1920s saw the consolidation of the industry, the building of the great movie palaces, and the arrival of sound. The release of The Jazz Singer in October 1927, starring Al Jolson, was the first feature-length motion picture with synchronized dialogue sequences; within two years, the silent film was effectively dead. By 1929, weekly movie attendance in the United States was estimated at 80 million — about two-thirds of the population — and Hollywood had become the dream factory of the world. The decade’s biggest stars — Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, Clara Bow — were more recognizable to most Americans than their own congressmen.

Sports were the third great entertainment of the decade, the era later called the Golden Age of Sports. Babe Ruth transformed baseball from a contact game into a power game, hitting 60 home runs in 1927 — a single-season record that would stand until 1961. Jack Dempsey drew the first million-dollar gates in boxing history, and the 1927 rematch with Gene Tunney at Soldier Field in Chicago was the first sporting event broadcast nationally by radio. Red Grange, the “Galloping Ghost” of the University of Illinois and the Chicago Bears, helped invent professional football. Bill Tilden dominated tennis. The three Olympic Games of the decade — Antwerp 1920, Paris 1924, and Amsterdam 1928, plus the first Winter Olympics at Chamonix in 1924 — drew enormous attention. The same forces that had made mass entertainment possible — urbanization, mass production, the eight-hour workday, the eight-cent dollar movie ticket — also made it a defining part of American identity.

The Three Cultural Wars: Scopes, the Klan, and Immigration Restriction

The cultural revolution of the 1920s did not go unchallenged. Three great cultural battles of the decade — the Scopes Trial of 1925, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, and the long struggle over immigration restriction — defined the limits of the new America.

The Scopes Trial (formally The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes) took place in Dayton, Tennessee, in July 1925. John Scopes, a young high school teacher, had been charged with violating a state law forbidding the teaching of evolution. The American Civil Liberties Union had advertised for a teacher to test the law. The trial became a national sensation. The defense team was led by Clarence Darrow, the famous defense attorney and self-declared agnostic; the prosecution was led by William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate and champion of Protestant fundamentalism. Darrow’s cross-examination of Bryan, in which he forced Bryan to admit that the Bible should be interpreted literally only in some places, humiliated the old populist and contributed to his death five days after the trial ended. Scopes was convicted (the conviction was later overturned on a technicality), but the trial established that the new American culture of science and modernism was not going to be rolled back by religious conservatism.

The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s was a very different organization from the Reconstruction-era Klan that had been suppressed by federal force in the 1870s. Founded in 1915 by William J. Simmons, a former preacher, in Stone Mountain, Georgia, the “Second Klan” was a national fraternal organization that claimed four million members at its peak in the mid-1920s. Unlike the first Klan, it was not confined to the South; it had strong membership in Indiana, Ohio, Oregon, Colorado, and other Northern and Western states. And unlike the first Klan, its targets were not just African Americans but also Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and bootleggers. The Klan’s recruiting pitch — the defense of “100 percent Americanism” — was a response to the cultural changes of the decade: the rising visibility of Catholics (Al Smith, the Democratic nominee for president in 1928, was a Catholic), the great wave of Southern and Eastern European immigration that had brought an estimated 14.5 million immigrants to the United States between 1900 and 1920, and the broader liberalization of American morals. The Klan’s political influence was significant: it helped elect governors, senators, and mayors across the country, and the 1924 Democratic National Convention was paralyzed by a debate over whether to condemn the Klan by name. (It could not.) The Klan’s membership and influence declined sharply after 1925, partly because of scandals and partly because of resistance from Catholic and Jewish organizations, but its legacy of racial and religious violence would outlast the decade.

Immigration restriction was the third great cultural battle. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act) imposed national-origin quotas on immigration for the first time in American history. The 1924 Act limited total immigration to about 150,000 per year and allocated visas in proportion to the national origins of the American population as recorded in the 1890 census — a result that heavily favored immigrants from Northern and Western Europe (Britain, Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia) and severely restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe (Italy, Poland, Russia, the Balkans), as well as effectively banning most immigration from Asia. The motivations were partly economic (preserving jobs for native-born workers), partly cultural (the older, more established immigrant groups wanted to keep out newer ones), and partly openly racist and anti-Semitic. The 1924 Act would shape American immigration policy for the next forty years and would not be significantly reformed until 1965.

Advertising and the Birth of Modern Consumerism

The 1920s were also the decade in which modern American consumerism was invented. The development is treated in detail in the consumer culture of the 1920s section, but the cultural dimension is important. Before the 1920s, most Americans bought what they needed or what their parents had bought; the 1920s introduced the idea that buying could be a form of self-expression, and that clever advertising could persuade them to want things they had never needed before.

The advertising revolution of the 1920s was the work of a small group of New York copywriters, art directors, and psychologists. The first “copywriting” agency in the modern sense had been established in the 1890s, but the 1920s saw the rise of the full-service agency and the new profession of the “creative director.” Bruce Barton (1886–1967), the founder of the Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (BBDO) agency, wrote a 1925 book, The Man Nobody Knows, that presented Jesus Christ as the original salesman; the book became a bestseller. Edward Bernays (1891–1995), the nephew of Sigmund Freud, applied Freudian psychology to public relations; he later claimed credit for inventing the field. Earnest Elmo Calkins (1868–1964) and Raymond Rubicam (1892–1978) at the Young & Rubicam agency pioneered the idea that advertising should sell lifestyles as well as products.

The 1920s also saw the birth of the modern brand. Companies like Coca-Cola, Lucky Strike, Kellogg’s, Wrigley’s, and Chrysler were not just selling products; they were selling identities. The “Torches of Freedom” campaign of 1929, in which Bernays recruited a group of young women to march in the Easter Day Parade in New York smoking Lucky Strike cigarettes, was an early example of this kind of brand activism: by linking cigarettes to women’s liberation, the campaign tried to expand the market for tobacco by half. The flapper was the ideal consumer for this new advertising because she was young, urban, mobile, and — at least in the advertiser’s imagination — willing to be persuaded to buy almost anything.

The Automobile and the Transformation of Daily Life

No single technology did more to transform the daily life of the 1920s than the automobile. The development of the automobile industry in the 1920s is treated in detail elsewhere, but the cultural consequences in the 1920s were immediate. The number of registered motor vehicles in the United States climbed from about 8 million in 1920 to nearly 27 million in 1929. By the end of the decade, more than half of American families owned a car.

The cultural consequences were vast. The automobile gave young people a private, unchaperoned space in which to court. The “parking” date (more crudely, “necking” or “petting”) became a fixture of adolescent life, and the back seat of a sedan became, in the eyes of ministers and parents, a moral danger zone. The automobile also enabled the growth of the suburbs, since workers no longer needed to live within walking distance of their jobs. The new suburban subdivisions, with their standardized houses and curvilinear streets, were a direct consequence of the automobile, and they reshaped American family life in ways that are still being felt.

The automobile also helped spread the new morality into the countryside. Before mass automobile ownership, the social life of rural America was constrained by geography and the watchful eyes of parents and neighbors. The automobile made it possible for young people in small towns to drive to a dance hall in the next county, to a roadhouse on a back road, or simply to a lover’s lane. The cultural battles of the 1920s over the car, the flapper, and the speakeasy were connected, and they were all in some sense battles over the loss of parental and community supervision of young people.

Changing Gender Norms

The cultural revolution of the 1920s transformed American gender norms more visibly than any other dimension of life. The transformation was not as sudden or as complete as contemporaries sometimes claimed, but it was real and lasting.

For women, the changes of the 1920s were tangible. The Nineteenth Amendment (1920) gave them the vote. The flapper fashions — short hair, short skirts, makeup, smoking in public, going out unchaperoned — were a visible repudiation of Victorian standards. The expansion of white-collar work for women — as typists, secretaries, telephone operators, saleswomen, and clerks — gave a generation of single women an independent income and a life outside the home. The 1920 census found that for the first time, more than half of all adult American women were in the paid workforce. Many of the cultural changes, like the flapper fashion itself, were partly a product of women’s new economic independence.

The changes for men were less visible but equally real. The Victorian model of masculinity — the stern, self-controlled, religious, family-centered breadwinner — began to give way in the 1920s to a new model: the rugged, secular, sometimes reckless “he-man” represented in popular culture by Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey, in fiction by Hemingway’s heroes, and in the movies by Douglas Fairbanks in his swashbuckling roles. The new masculinity was not less patriarchal than the old, but it was more openly physical, more willing to display emotion, and more accepting of men spending time and money on their own pleasures.

These changes, however, did not extend to all Americans. Most African American women in the 1920s lived under Jim Crow, where the new freedom of the flapper was largely unavailable. Mexican American women in the Southwest faced both racial and gender discrimination. Immigrant women in the industrial cities of the North often worked in the worst-paid jobs under the worst conditions. The “new woman” of the 1920s was, like most cultural ideals of the period, a fantasy as much as a reality — but a fantasy that, like all powerful fantasies, gradually changed the world it described.

The Limits of the New Culture

The new culture of the 1920s was not as all-conquering as its promoters claimed. Fundamentalist Protestantism remained the dominant religious force in much of the country, and the Scopes Trial was only the most visible of many attempts to enforce traditional moral standards. The Volstead Act remained in force throughout the decade, and the federal government made sporadic, often spectacularly corrupt, efforts to enforce it. The Equal Rights Amendment, first introduced in 1923 by Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party, made little progress in a decade that was politically and culturally conservative.

The decade’s most consequential failure was the Great Depression that followed. The 1920s boom, the 1920s prosperity, the 1920s confidence — all of it came to a crashing end in October 1929, and the prosperity that had supported the flapper, the jazz musician, and the speakeasy was gone. The **end of the Roaring Twenties](../the-roaring-twenties/end-of-the-roaring-twenties/) is the subject of a separate section, but it is important to remember here that the culture of the 1920s was, in part, a product of a specific economic moment, and that moment passed.

The Legacy of the Decade

The 1920s marked the moment when the United States became recognizably modern. The changes that took place in that single decade — the automobile, the radio, the talking film, the electric refrigerator, the modern skyscraper, the cigarette, the cocktail, the bobbed hair, the short skirt, the mass-circulation magazine, the installment plan, the department store, the chain grocery, the professional spectator sport, the national advertising campaign, the flapper, the professional jazz musician, the Harlem Renaissance — all of these were either just arrived or arriving fast. They would shape the rest of the twentieth century.

Many of the decade’s worst features also survived: the resurgent Klan, the racial segregation, the mass incarceration of African Americans in the criminal justice system, the income inequality, the cultural conflict between rural traditionalists and urban modernizers. These, too, are part of the legacy of the 1920s.

But the dominant note of the decade, the one that has stuck in the American imagination ever since, is the one that Hemingway’s narrator in A Moveable Feast recalled about the early 1920s in Paris: “We ate well and cheaply and we slept well and warmed and we were working and we were happy.” The 1920s were the moment when Americans — at least a substantial fraction of them — first glimpsed the modern world they would spend the rest of the century building. The story of that moment is told in more detail in the flapper movement, the jazz age music scene, the long history of Prohibition and the speakeasy, the Harlem Renaissance, and the daily life of the 1920s sections of this site.