Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s

BECOMING MODERN

BECOMING MODERN

Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s

Birgitte Søland

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2000 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY

All Rights Reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Søland, Birgitte, 1959-

Becoming modern : young women and the reconstruction of womanhood in the 1920s / Birgitte Søland

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-04927-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Women—Denmark—History—20th century. 2. Sex role—

Denmark—History—20th century. 3. Feminism—Denmark—

History—20th century. I. Title.

HQ1672.S65 2000

305.4'09489—dc21 00-021053

www.pup.princeton.edu

10   9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2

ISBN-13: 978-0-691-04927-4 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-691-04927-0 (cloth)

eISBN: 978-1-400-83927-8

R0

For all the people on both sides of the Atlantic whom 1 feel fortunate to call my family

Contents

Acknowledgments  ix

INTRODUCTION  3

PART I: From Victorian Ladies to Modern Girls: The Construction of a New Style of Femininity  19

CHAPTER 1

The Emergence of the Modern Look  22

CHAPTER 2

Fit for Modernity  46

PART II: The New Eve and the Old Adam? The Creation of Modern Gender Relations 65

CHAPTER 3

Good Girls and Bad Girls  69

CHAPTER 4

Beauties and Boyfriends, Bitches and Brutes  91

PART III: "A Great New Task": The Modernization of Marriage and Domestic Life  113

CHAPTER 5

From Pragmatic Unions to Romantic Partnerships?  117

CHAPTER 6

A Most Important Profession  144

Conclusion  169

Notes  177

Select Bibliography  227

Index  247

Acknowledgments

As A EUROPEAN teenager in the late 1970s, I spent a good part of my life in cheap apartments and damp basement rooms, smoking cigarettes and discussing Karl Marx’s Das Kapital with comrades who were as committed to the Revolution as I was. Off and on, when our discussions ran dry, I would visit my grandmother, who always offered coffee, pastries, and delightful company. Besides, she had impeccable working-class credentials, having worked as a cleaning lady her entire adult life while raising three kids on her own. It was therefore with incredulity that I heard her question my political activities. I just don’t know, she suddenly said one day. Your generation, you seem so clever, so accomplished, but I don’t think you know how to have fun like we did. At the time, I was too young and too self-absorbed to ask what she meant, but by now I realize that she may have been right. My grandmother, a modern young woman in the 1920s, certainly danced more than I ever did. And she dressed better. My first thanks therefore goes to my grandmother, Rosalie Christensen, who indirectly brought me to this topic.

In the years since then, I have incurred numerous other debts of gratitude. At the University of Minnesota, where I wrote the dissertation that preceded this book, I received crucial financial support for my research from the Graduate School and the History Department. A University of Minnesota dissertation fellowship, an Institute of International Education research grant, and a William Stearns Davis Memorial Fellowship all proved extremely helpful. I also benefited from the generous comments and constructive criticisms of many excellent teachers and scholars, including Sara Evans, Michael Metcalf, Gianna Pomata, and Ann Waltner. Barbara Laslett, in particular, asked challenging questions and has continued to push me to clarify my thinking. Nan Enstad, Sharon Dohorty, Tim Coates, Louise Edwards, Winston McDowell, John Wrathall, and other fellow graduate students read conference papers and chapter drafts, gave helpful suggestions, and offered their camaraderie. Special thanks to Susan Cahn, whose companionship contributed to making those years a rich chapter in my life.

But among the many Minnesota folks, I owe the greatest debt to Mary Jo Maynes. It was her brilliant teaching that first led me to stray from my commitment to return to Denmark after a brief stint as an intellectual tourist in the United States. As my adviser, she allowed me to pursue my intellectual interests, never questioning the validity of my topic or my approach, but providing ample advice and incisive criticisms. And long after her official duties came to an end, she has remained a generous mentor and a good friend.

In the years since leaving Minnesota, a Seed Grant from the College of Humanities at the Ohio State University and generous leave time from teaching obligations in the History Department made it possible to complete this project. I have also benefited enormously from the help of friends and colleagues who read drafts of this book, encouraged and supported me, offered their criticisms in the true spirit of intellectual exchange, and laughed at the right times. For that and for many other acts of random kindness, I would like to thank Susan Hartmann, David Hoffmann, John Rothney, Steven Conn, Michelle Mouton, Ken Andrien, Pippa Holloway, Katja David-Fox, and Sonya Michel. I am especially grateful to Leila Rupp, who has been an extraordinary colleague, mentor, and friend. Her enthusiasm and confidence in my work never failed, and without her help, advice, and tireless promotional efforts this book might never have seen the light of day.

I am also indebted to a host of people on the other side of the Atlantic. My thanks goes to the many Danish archivists and librarians who often went far beyond the call of duty in their efforts to help and to the many women who agreed to be interviewed for this project. I am deeply grateful for their willingness to share their time and their memories and for trusting me with their words.

Numerous Danish friends offered encouragement, companionship, and generous hospitality. I owe thanks—and many meals—to Dorthe Spåbæk, Aage Kirk, Lone Smetana, Peter A. Petersen, Susan Moller Jensen, Bahman Safanyia, Stig Winther Petersen, Hanne Nielsen, Hanne Moller Andersen, Jan Haverslev, Ole Christiansen, Ruth Grønborg, Søren F. Nielsen, Allan Andersen, and Aase Bak.

I would also like to thank my family, Aase Søland, Peter Søland, Lone Terp Søland, Jens Søland, Tine Mangart Søland, Henrik Skov Andersen, and Michael Ballegaard, for all their encouragement and support. I am particularly grateful to my sister, Anne Marie Søland, whose humor, wisdom, and companionship, in good times and hard ones, means the world to me, and to my father, Harald Søland, who taught me the love of learning and never wavered in his entirely unrealistic estimation of my abilities. Finally, my thanks goes to Nancy Guzowski for her support, her love, and her laughter—and for reminding me that there are days when it doesn’t matter at all whether you can spell Thursday.

BECOMING MODERN

INTRODUCTION

IN AUGUST 1919, when Johanne Blom turned fifteen, her aunt gave her a diary. At first she thought it an odd gift, but in the years that followed she would fill its delicate cream-colored pages with detailed, and often humorous, descriptions of her family and friends, her work and leisure in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen. Occasionally, she would venture from these topics and use her diary as so many other young girls have done—as a place to record her dreams and desires, her hopes and longings. In one such entry, written on January 21, 1923, she noted that I so look forward to getting married and having my own home. I would like to have children. Three I think. That seems a good number. A few years later, after she had met the man whom she would later marry, she repeated this vision of the good life. I can think of nothing better, she enthused, than becoming Ejnar’s wife.

But despite her rather conventional dreams, Johanne thought of herself as anything but traditional. Already as a sixteen-year-old, she was adamant that her life was going to be different from her mother’s. All mother ever does is work. I don’t know how she can stand it. ... I will never live like that, she wrote on October 20, 1920. Obviously, Johanne was hoping for a more pleasurable existence, a life filled with more excitement, fun, and romance. I am a modern young girl, she insisted the following year, after a furious fight with her parents over her right to go to a dance hosted by the Social Democratic Youth Club. I want to go out. Mother and father are so old-fashioned. They always want me to sit at home, never do anything else, but I’m not like that.¹ Many decades later, as a woman in her late eighties, Johanne Blom still remembered her youthful ambitions. I grew up at a time when everything was changing, she explained. Young girls like us, we wanted things to be different. We wanted to be modern.²

This book is about women such as Johanne—Danish women who came of age in the 1910s and 1920s, self-consciously seeking to take advantage of the social and sexual upheavals that characterized those years, to reshape female identities and gender relations, and to establish what they perceived to be modern lives for themselves. This book follows them from adolescence through early adulthood and into the marriages that almost all of them would eventually enter, arguing that these women’s ideas of what constituted female modernity and their efforts to translate these ideals into practical reality in their daily lives played a central role in the shaping of twentieth-century styles of femininity and womanhood.

But this study is not just about Denmark. It offers a broader analysis of the reorganization of gender relations that characterized most of Western Europe in the decade following World War I. At the end of the war, it was certainly not only Danes who believed that they were witnessing the collapse of the world as we knew it, that nothing is the same anymore, women are not the same anymore.³ Across the continent, European observers were struck by the immense changes they seemed to be witnessing in women’s lives. In the course of just a few short decades, virtually every aspect of nineteenth-century womanhood seemed to have come under attack, and by the late 1910s, the time when the housebound Victorian lady reigned as the uncontested feminine ideal seemed nothing but a faint memory.

In part, this perception stemmed from the legal and political gains women had made since the late nineteenth century. Not only had new educational opportunities allowed a small but growing number of university-educated women to make their way into the professions, but the burgeoning feminist and suffrage movements had brought women out of the home and into the public eye. By the end of the 1910s, feminists had even succeeded in many countries in securing women’s suffrage and in pushing through other kinds of reform legislation that gradually improved their legal status. Collectively, these changes all seemed to liberate women from conventional ties and obligations, and even before the war, many contemporaries worried about the emergence of a new type of woman, who rejected Victorian concepts of domesticity and instead threw herself into a broad range of public activities previously deemed incompatible with proper womanhood.⁴

On a more immediate level, the sense of sexual upheaval grew from women’s activities during World War I. As millions of European men departed for the front, middle-class women took up white-collar jobs, working-class women moved into better-paid industrial jobs, country girls swarmed into factories, and older rural women took charge of farms. As engineers and administrators, bricklayers and carpenters, railroad conductors and bus drivers, farm hands and munitions workers, women of all classes moved into positions they had never held before, and in the process they proved themselves perfectly capable of handling what had in the past been men’s jobs. As if this was not troubling enough, many women seemed to enjoy their new activities, and young women in particular seemed disturbingly reluctant after the war to relinquish the freedoms and privileges that wartime salaries had afforded them.⁵

Given all this, it is perhaps not surprising that many Europeans concluded that they were witnessing the rapid dismantling of traditional forms of womanhood. But if just about everybody agreed that a profound breach with the past had taken place and that the old order could not be restored, they differed greatly in their assessments of what would replace the familiar patterns. Had World War I produced a civilization without sexes, as French writer Pierre Drieu la Rochelle argued?⁶ Would European societies become a new form of Amazon republics, as others predicted?⁷ Would the postwar world be one in which wives rule their husbands, women leave women’s work, and young girls do their best to ape men?⁸ Were women really gaining the upper hand, as the Danish journalist Søren Pedersen-Tarp concluded after a trip through England and France in 1921?⁹ Or were the postwar years likely to see the birth of a new world in which man and woman stand side by side as equals, as many feminists hoped?¹⁰ Would the 1920s mark the dawn of a new era, where gender took a back seat to character and accomplishments?¹¹ Only one thing seemed certain: Social stability would not be restored before gender issues had been settled.

The 1920s, therefore, witnessed an enormous preoccupation with issues of female identity and women’s proper role. Across Western Europe, politicians and labor leaders debated how best to regulate female employment and restore the sexual division of labor, and practically every national parliament spent considerable time devising legislation that would protect the family as a social institution. Outside the world of politics, teachers and physicians sought to define new standards for female education and health, while psychologists and social workers pontificated on the complexities of the modern female psyche. Sociologists threw their energy into surveying women’s behavior, and journalists regularly polled readers on just about every topic, from girls’ education and appropriate child-rearing practices to women’s suffrage and the best use of leisure time. At the same time, a veritable outpouring of prescriptive literature sought to define women’s new duties and responsibilities, and advice columnists and etiquette experts eagerly dispensed their counsel on proper female behavior in books, newspapers, and magazines. Not surprisingly, gender issues also permeated contemporary fiction, and both popular and elite writers offered troubling, and often scandalous, accounts of the consequences of the much-feared blurring of gender distinctions that supposedly was taking place.¹²

Only toward the end of the 1920s did this obsession with women begin to fade. In part, it was the onset of the Great Depression that shifted public attention toward different matters, but the dwindling concern about gender had other causes as well. Even though women’s roles, behavior, and position in society would continue to change, the foundations of a new social and sexual order had by then been sufficiently established for most contemporaries to abandon the issue. While some conservatives never stopped longing for an idealized past when women supposedly had no ambitions other than marriage and motherhood, and many feminists continued to criticize sexual inequalities, at least the outlines of modern female identities and gender relations had been determined.

The decade following World War I therefore constitutes a pivotal transitional moment in the history of European gender relations during which Victorian gender arrangements met their final demise and a re-formed gender order gradually was established. Focusing less on what was destroyed than on what was put in its place, this study offers a historical analysis of the social, cultural, rhetorical, and political processes through which the creation of new and recognizably modern gender arrangements was accomplished in one of these European countries—Denmark.

THE 1920s—A DECADE OF LIBERATION FOR WOMEN?

Until feminist scholars began reexamining history, the 1920s were often described as the decade in which women became liberated. The evidence for such an optimistic interpretation seemed plentiful. In most European countries, women’s suffrage was granted by the end of World War I, and reform legislation continued to improve women’s civil and legal status. Many remaining barriers to women’s entry into the professions were dismantled, and employment opportunities expanded. Although still far below those of men, women’s wages were increasing, allowing more women than ever before the pleasures of independent consumer spending. In addition, the granting of legitimacy to female sexual desire allowed women to discard a prudish and repressive sexual morality and engage in various forms of cultural and sexual experimentation.¹³

More recent studies of women’s experiences in Germany, France, and England have forcefully punctured this myth of the Golden Twenties.¹⁴ Historians such as Renate Bridenthal, Karin Hausen, James McMillan, Jane Lewis, and Miriam Glucksmann have all documented striking continuities in women’s subordination in the home as well as in the workplace, their marginal impact on political decision making, and their limited access to resources.¹⁵ Some scholars have even argued that the postwar decade witnessed a direct backlash against the gains women had achieved before and during the war, placing feminists and single, professional women especially on the defensive.¹⁶ Still others have questioned the impact of new sexual ideologies, arguing that they largely functioned to limit women’s control over their own sexuality and discredit any erotic choices other than heterosexual marriage.¹⁷

In light of this research, optimistic assertions about social change in the postwar decade lose much of their credibility. Clearly, women did not achieve sexual equality in any simple sense in the course of the 1920s, and the strides they made toward liberation may well have been so small as not to warrant much feminist attention. But by framing their arguments solely in terms of the long-term impact on women’s lives, these historians have tended to overlook contemporary reports that described, with enthusiasm or anxiety, what many observers believed to be the rapid dismantling of traditional forms of womanhood and the emergence of new social and sexual patterns. While such reports may well, as French historian Mary Louise Roberts has noted, have been wrong from a purely structural standpoint, postwar Europeans were nevertheless convinced that they were witnessing a profound upheaval; thus, rather than being dismissed, this cultural reality deserves our attention.¹⁸

As many cultural historians have pointed out, debates about gender such as those that characterized the decade following World War I always mask concerns both about gender and about something else again.¹⁹ In the case of the 1920s, the obsession with women’s roles and behavior clearly reflected more general anxieties over social disorder, socioeconomic change, and the collapse of long-standing moral and ideological doctrines. Consequently, the impression that women were discarding all notions of proper female behavior was both fed by and feeding into already existing fears that the world was in disarray. Through analyses of a society’s discourse on gender, we may therefore uncover central aspects of its values and fears, its hopes and conflicts, and its power relations and social dynamics. Adopting this approach, Mary Louise Roberts, Susan Kingsley Kent, and Billie Melman have provided acute insights into the ways in which French and British men and women made sense of and came to terms with a web of social, political, and cultural changes in the wake of World War I.²⁰

Like these studies, this book takes seriously the sense of upheaval that characterized the 1920s, but its analytical focus is somewhat different. As many critics have noted, discourse analysis, no matter how careful and sophisticated, tends to leave us with little knowledge about men’s and women’s actual lives. Surely, the Modern Woman—the scantily clad, sexually liberated, economically independent, self-reliant female—was a rhetorical construction, the quintessential symbol of a world in disarray. But modern women—women who cut their hair, wore short skirts, worked for wages, and enjoyed themselves outside the home—were not just figments of anxious imaginations, and to read the postwar debates about women as solely, or predominantly, debates about the changes wrought by the war ignores both the social and sexual struggles that characterized the 1920s and the very real changes in women’s behavior that this decade witnessed. The construction of a new gender order was therefore not only the product of elite discourses and male-made policies, but also the outcome of a highly contested process of social change, in which the beliefs and practices of a much broader array of actors played a crucial role. And although this process may not ultimately have overturned fundamental power relations between men and women, it transformed many patterns of daily life.

In addition to an analysis of the cultural discourses that developed to make sense of and regulate the emerging styles of modern femininity and womanhood, this book therefore focuses on the agency of ordinary working-class and middle-class people in the construction of a new order, and it argues that the young women who figured so prominently in the postwar discourse were not only the object of discourse but also central agents in the charting of new female identities.²¹ When contemporaries struggled to determine how modern the modern woman would be, which characteristics would define attractive femininity and proper womanhood in the twentieth century, where the boundaries for women’s new freedoms were to be drawn, and which features would characterize male-female relationships, the answers to those questions certainly grew not only from cultural discourses but also from the social practices of the women in question. An examination of social practices and lived experiences therefore promises to add yet another dimension to our understanding of the interrelationship between gender and change in the 1920s.

THE CAUSES OF UPHEAVAL

In the 1920s, virtually all cultural critics were convinced that, while other factors contributed to the destruction of long-standing gender arrangements, World War I played the greatest role in that process. Whether they blamed the absence of men from the home front, the killing of millions of male heads of households, or the return of thousands of crippled war veterans or believed that women’s labor market participation, their experiences of financial independence, and the self-confidence they seemed to have gained were the main culprits, critics generally agreed that the war was a turning point, a transformative event that profoundly and irrevocably changed its survivors.

In the years since then, most studies of European women, men, and gender relations in the 1920s have focused on nations that were directly involved in the war, and they have, by and large, reinforced contemporary beliefs that it was the war that caused the upheavals. According to British historians Gail Braybon and Penny Summerfield, for example, once women had been let out of the cage and permitted to demonstrate their talents and capabilities in the labor market during wartime, the spell of female domesticity was broken, and it took a powerful mixture of ideological campaigns and coercive political measures to restore the sexual division of labor after 1918.²² Close readings of British and German men’s postwar writings have convinced other scholars that the horrors of trench warfare functioned to undercut the heroic image of the male warrior, destabilize masculine identities, and produce both a gulf between men’s and women’s wartime experiences and a misogyny among returning war veterans so intense as to short-circuit any return to prewar patterns.²³ Still others have argued that the atrocities led to a more general cultural crisis, triggering the re-thinking of all social relationships.²⁴

Among those historians who take a broader look at social and sexual change in early twentieth-century Europe, the importance of World War I as a causal factor for postwar developments is often compounded by more long-term trends. As they point out, lower birthrates, smaller households, and industrially produced household goods had paved the way from the turn of the century for a restructuring of family life and marital relations; also, even before the war, rising wages had lifted many working-class families out of the direst poverty.²⁵ Mass production, rationalization, and a dramatic growth in the service sector—all developments that functioned to draw more women than ever before out of the home, away from agricultural and domestic work, and into shops, factories, and offices— also preceded the war. In their view, World War I thus only accelerated trends that had already begun to alter social and economic life before 1914, and even though women’s contributions to the war effort brought them into the public eye, they did not significantly alter social and economic patterns that were already well under way before the war.

Whether historians grant World War I or more long-term social and economic developments the greater significance in their explanations, they generally agree that those two phenomena constitute the sine qua non, the foundations without which cultural upheaval in the 1920s would not have occurred. In Germany, England, and France, the countries that have attracted most scholarly attention, this may well be the case, but such explanations do not account for similar turmoil in nations that were neither involved in World War I nor as industrially advanced as the major European powers. Surely, Brazil in the 1920s did not belong in this category, yet concerns about women and gender definitions akin to those of Western Europe reverberated through Brazilian public discourse.²⁶ During those same years, Japan, another country that hardly belonged among the most industrialized nations in the 1920s, was embroiled in similar debates about the controversial appearances and behavior of the moga, the Japanese version of the modern girl.²⁷ Even China, among the least industrialized societies in the world, was not exempt from such concerns.²⁸

Obviously, factors other than international warfare and industrial development were contributing to gender upheaval in the early decades of the twentieth century, and analyses of gender change in countries that were less economically developed and not directly involved in the war may therefore shed new light on the causes and dynamics of gender upheaval in the 1910s and 1920s. By focusing on Denmark—a small, nonbelligerent and in the early decades of the twentieth century still largely agrarian country—this study offers one such analysis, seeking to explain how and why similar forms of social and sexual change took place in a context quite different from those that historians have typically explored.

GENDER UPHEAVAL AND THE DANISH CASE

In the early years of the twentieth century, Denmark was hardly among the Western nations spearheading social and economic change. With a population of merely three million people, an economy based on agriculture, few natural resources, very little heavy industry, and no colonial possessions to speak of, it belonged among the less powerful, prosperous, and advanced European countries. And despite improvements in farming techniques, the emergence of agricultural cooperatives, and strong commercial ties with other European countries, there were few indications that this was about to change in any significant way.²⁹

Nevertheless, Denmark was still impacted by some of the same social and economic trends that characterized other parts of Western Europe in the early twentieth century. As elsewhere in the Western world, migration from rural to urban areas was beginning to alter demographic patterns.³⁰ Between 1900 and 1920, the proportion of the Danish population living in urban areas increased from 38 percent to 46 percent.³¹ During those same twenty years, the percentage of Danes living in Copenhagen—the nation’s capital and largest city—grew from 16 percent to 23 percent.³² Simultaneously, the share of the population that secured its livelihood from farming decreased, dropping from 40 percent in 1901 to 30 percent in 1930.³³ Although the majority of the population would continue to live in the countryside throughout the 1920s, urban life was therefore becoming a more common Danish experience, and as elsewhere, city lights beckoned many country youths.

During these years industrialization was also making its mark on Danish society, although much slower and in a less substantial way than in many other countries. In the early decades of the twentieth century, handicrafts and nonmechanized production for local markets persisted, small workshops remained the norm rather than the exception, and most industrial enterprises were limited in size and not particularly advanced in terms of technology. By 1920, after thirty years of steady growth both in the number of industrial enterprises and the number of people employed in industry, this sector of the economy still employed only a small minority of the Danish work force.³⁴ Indicative of the Danish economic structure, most export goods, such as butter, cheese, bacon, canned goods, and other food stuffs, came from agriculture, and throughout the interwar years economic growth would continue to spring from agriculture and commerce rather than industry.³⁵

During World War I this economic structure would prove an unexpected advantage. Needing to feed not only expansive armies but also their population on the home front, warring countries purchased great quantities of Danish food products. As a result, small companies exploded into booming businesses, and new enterprises mushroomed across the country, transforming modest merchants and small-scale businesspeople into a new class of nouveau riches, or goulash barons as they were known at the time.³⁶ In a more limited sense, wartime commerce also affected the lives of working people. In the course of the war, employment rates were high and wages rose. For skilled male workers, hourly wages increased 71 percent between 1914 and 1918, and the income of women workers rose at an a similar rate.³⁷ While shortages of goods, rationing, and inflation certainly limited the rise in living standards that such wage increases might suggest, the purchasing power of workers’ incomes still grew by 60 percent between 1914 and 1920, allowing most Danish working-class families for the first time ever to position themselves, however tenuously, on the safe side of the poverty line.³⁸

In the postwar decade, these very real economic advances were undercut by inflation, bankruptcies, and wildly fluctuating unemployment rates, leaving most Danish families less than financially secure. As elsewhere in Europe, the 1920s were generally years of crisis and instability, not years of economic boom, as was the case in the United States. Nonetheless, the Danish controversies over women and gender, while set in a context of economic insecurity, did not emerge in a situation of rapid industrialization or other fundamental changes in the social or economic structure.

Nor did they spring from experiences of wartime upheavals in the sexual division of labor or