Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [25]
The activist Margaret Sanger introduced American women to the diaphragm from 1916 onwards, illegally importing them from Germany and Holland until she helped fund the first U.S. manufacturer in 1925. After 1919, sales of vastly improved latex condoms, thinner and seamless unlike those previously made from rubber cement, soared throughout the decade. Because the 1873 Comstock Act banned the sale and advertising of contraceptive devices as well as pornographic material, these products still had to be procured behind a veil of euphemism. Women bought ambiguous items labeled “feminine hygiene”; men asked their doctors to prescribe condoms for their health.
This growing awareness of contraceptive methods freed women in a multitude of ways. In the first place, it allowed the very daring to experiment with sex before marriage without fear of an unwanted pregnancy. One of Scott’s principal insecurities about Zelda was that she had made love to other men before she married him. The flip side of this was that marriage was no longer seen as the price men paid for sex, and that women, as well as men, began to view sexual desire as an essential element of a fulfilled relationship.
Within marriage, contraception meant women had fewer children, and having fewer children transformed a woman’s role from that of primarily mother, to that of primarily wife—or even allowed her to feel like an individual in her own right. Women with one or two children, as opposed to five or six, could have lives of their own, perhaps even jobs; their family’s standard of living tended to be higher; they could indulge their own needs— for an independent social life, to remain youthful and attractive —as well as those of their children and husband.
Smaller families also helped change how parents brought up their children. Ideas derived from the new science of psychology—especially those of Sigmund Freud and John Watson, whose 1913 article on what he called “Behaviorism” was hugely influential in the 1920s—prompted parents to be more demonstrative and permissive with their offspring. Children were given more attention and affection and were encouraged to express their personalities. Increasingly, independence was valued more highly than obedience. But children, when they came, were no less a hindrance than pregnancy to the true Flapper. In Paris in 1924, when their three-year-old daughter Scottie wouldn’t sleep, Zelda fed her a mixture of gin and sugar-water so that she and Scott could leave her at the hotel while they went to a party.
Dyed hair and make-up, like smoking and drinking, no longer marked out the fallen woman—or perhaps women no longer cared about flaunting their descent from respectability. Being deliberately provocative was the height of chic. Scott described Zelda as Gloria, heroine of The Beautiful and Damned, earnestly explaining that she had worn a fur trimmed grey suit on her first date with Anthony Patch, “because with grey you have to wear a lot of paint.”
When cosmetics began to be seen as an “affordable indulgence,” beauty became a multimillion-dollar industry. In 1920 there were only 750 beauty salons in New York; that number had risen to 3,000 in 1925, and by 1930 there were 40,000 nationwide. Madame C. J. Walker had made a fortune with her hair “de-kinker” in Harlem; downtown, Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein were launching flourishing business empires capitalizing on the Flapper’s obsession with her looks. Far from liberating women, bobbed and bleached hair necessitated frequent visits to the coiffeur; nail varnish was considered delightfully daring; lipstick, rouge and powder had become everyday essentials.
A powder compact hidden in a shoe-buckle was aimed at the modern party girl, dancing too uninhibitedly to carry a handbag. Movie stars and society beauties appeared in aspirational advertisements promoting face creams, soap and make-up. The message was that women were constantly on display—and it was their responsibility to make the best of themselves by using the best products they could afford. The beauty industry