Category: Life
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Vodka or Ruin
Did you know that Russia had a Prohibition Era for alcohol during some of the same years as the U.S. did? In the U.S., Prohibition took effect in 1920. In Russia, it started a few years earlier, during World War I. But during the first half of the 1920s, the country desperately needed the money…
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The Age of Heroines
According to a 1922 New York Times Magazine article, the average age of female protagonists in love stories had increased by about a decade since around 1900 or so. In the appreciation of the public of today, mature beauty eclipses mere girlish loveliness. It was not always so. Fifteen or twenty years ago the heroines of…
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Tenting on the New Camp Ground
As more cars entered consumers’ hands, by summer 1922, Americans were driving across the country for vacations and trips at at unprecedented level. This New York Times Magazine article described the phenomenon, as seen on highways and roads: Turns into any trans-continental highway, the Lincoln or the Dixie, the old trails of New York and New…
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Why Men Leave Home — In Print
A 1922 article by Frank J. Wilstach suggested more men might have been leaving their wives because their wives were becoming flappers, writing: “There are some things that even the strongest heart is unable to endure.” Only lately, however, I heard of a sweet and innocent young male person who was lured into the holy…
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Sorority of Smoke on Wheels
With women’s suffrage came an unexpected development: women smokers. In the 1920s, as the Medical University of South Carolina’s Hollings Cancer Center explains, “Passage of the 19th Amendment ushered in new freedoms and smoking in public became symbolic of women’s new role in society.” About 6% of women smoked cigarettes in 1924, but that more…
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One Hundred Years, More or Less
Back in 1922, living to age 100 was rare — extremely rare. As this New York Times Magazine article described: “When we read of someone’s living away beyond his one hundredth birthday we may feel pretty sure that the fable is narrated of an Indian or a negro or an illiterate white, and that documentary support…
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The Woman and the Stick
In 1922, New York Times Magazine published an opinion column — written by the pseudonymous “A Barbarian Bachelor” — advocating for wife-beating. It seems a safe bet he remained a bachelor for a while after this. Woman feels in her natural sphere, and therefore satisfied and happy when she is controlled absolutely by a man.…
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The Wild West’s Own New York
What place did New York occupy in the American imagination in 1922? This piece by Anne O’Hara McCormick acknowledged it was the highest-population city and the country’s cultural capital, but noted that in a nation so geographically large (and still expanding), it couldn’t dominate the nation as some European countries’ political and/or cultural capitals did.…
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After Two “Dry” Years
Two years after Prohibition was enacted via the Eighteenth Amendment, this New York Times article called it “practically irreversible.” You can see why, in January 1922, such a phrase would be used. The legislative branch didn’t seem to be budging on the issue. Still more significant has been the fact that the new Congress has…
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From Flapper to Girl Scout
After its 1912 founding, the Girl Scouts of the United States (as it was then known) had amassed almost 70,000 members by 1920. This 1921 New York Times Magazine article profiled the surging organization, which would more than triple its membership that decade to 200,000+ members by 1930. “Camping” to the girls has meant a canoe…
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