The New Woman: Changing Views of Women in the 1920s

IN his suggestive article, Happened to the Progressive Movement in the 1920's, Arthur S. Link analyzed the legacy of the pre-World War I coalition of businessmen, farm groups, labor unions, and advocates of social justice.' However, he neglected to mention the fate of feminists, either those women active in the suffrage movement or those involved in broader areas of social reform. Despite Link's inattention to women reformers, the question he posed about the progressive movement in the 1920s should be asked of the women's movement as well. What happened to feminism during the decade after the political goal of suffrage had been achieved? Failure to consider the women's movement in the 1920s is not an uncommon oversight among historians. Even students of women's history, including Eleanor Flexner, Andrew Sinclair, and Aileen Kraditor, conclude their accounts with the passage of the nineteenth amendment.2 Until recently, this tendency to ignore post-1920 women's history has fostered the repetition of a standard image of American women in the 1920s. Frederick Lewis Allen's account is representative: