Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [29]
A more enduring social change can be seen in twenties women’s attitudes to work. On one hand, the technological advances of the period freed women from heavy housework. Electric stoves, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and washing machines appeared; new houses were built with central heating, running water and modern plumbing. Clothes could be bought ready-made, laundry sent out, bread and ice-cream brought home from the shops. As standards of living rose, the time a woman needed to devote to keeping house fell.
But these modern conveniences did not come cheap, and the desire to contribute to the household income and give their family the best start in life led many women, married as well as single, to take up jobs outside the home. The twenties were a time when social and financial aspirations seemed achievable. “I’ve always wanted my girls to do something other than housework,” said one working-class Middletown mother. “I don’t want them to be house drudges like me!”
Part of this new attitude was the legacy of the Great War. While men were away training or at the front, women had taken their places in offices and factories. Despite being paid dramatically lower wages than their male counterparts, many found that they did not want to give up their newly discovered salaries and independence when peace was declared.
In Middletown in 1924, 89 percent of girls in the last three years of high school said that they planned to get jobs after they graduated—although most would give them up when they married. Women may have been willing to work, but many men were ambivalent about permitting them to do so. A 1923 poll showed that 90 percent of students from Vassar College were prepared to put marriage before a career. Still, by 1928, five times as many women had jobs as in 1918.
Increasingly, these jobs were white collar, rather than in factories or as domestic servants. Women became librarians, teachers, nurses, clerks, telephone operators, secretaries, stenographers, shop assistants. A few women blazed trails in areas hitherto dominated by men, as journalists, artists, advertising copywriters or scriptwriters, social workers, sociologists, photographers, doctors and lawyers.
Film was one of the first industries in which women competed on roughly equal terms with men, directing, producing and writing as well as acting. Like many best-selling authors of her day, Elinor Glyn was offered handsome terms to come to Hollywood to write and develop film scenarios. She arrived in 1920 to take up an offer of $10,000 per picture and ended up staying seven years, both writing and directing. “I wanted,” she wrote later of her time in Los Angeles, “to stir up in the cold hearts of the thousands of little fluffy, gold-digging American girls a desire for greater joy in love than is to be found in candy-boxes and car rides and fur coats.” Glyn named perhaps the most enduring marketing concept in movie history: “It,” or sex appeal, as embodied by Clara Bow in the 1926 film of the same name. When asked what “It” was, a bemused Bow is said to have replied, “I ain’t real sure.”
Anita Loos, author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, was another female writer who helped shape early Hollywood. A child actor, she knew the industry inside out by the time she started writing for the director D.W. Griffith in 1912, aged twenty-four; Mary Pickford, the greatest female star of the silent movie era, starred in her first screenplay. Loos would write