Tag: Life
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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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‘Heroes by Any Other Name’
This 1921 article was already calling Babe Ruth a “legend,” even though he hadn’t even won his first MVP award yet. I think most people are hero worshippers, don’t you? Only nowadays they do not pick their heroes from the ranks of soldiers and senators. Five years of war gave us no outstanding figure, but…
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Is the New Woman a Traitor to the Race?
In 1921, women were becoming more educated, getting married at later ages (or not at all), and having fewer children. Some considered this a crisis, though all three of those trends would become far more pronounced by 2021. Getting together a variety of statistics which deal with the biological results of the higher education of…
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College Sports and Motherhood
In 1921, some people argued, letting young women play college sports would make them worse mothers down the line: The Victorian girl was a better mother than our modern feminine athletes. Every girl, it seems, has a large store of vital and nervous energy, upon which to draw in the great crisis of motherhood. If…
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Psychiatric First Aid for Fiction Writers
Walter B. Pitkin, a professor of feature and short-story writing at Columbia University School of Journalism in 1921, had an unusual piece of advice for how to write better love and romance stories: don’t fall in love yourself. One young man, for instance, began by writing love stories as class exercises, and did them with…
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The Prohibition of Laughter
Despite the Roaring Twenties nickname, journalist James C. Young diagnosed a phenomenon sweeping the country in 1921, in his article “The Prohibition of Laughter”: people intentionally seeking out sad forms of entertainment. Returning players gather in little knots on the Rialto and repeat the same theme — people decline to laugh any more. Victor Herbert…
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Enjoying the Presidency
A few months into office in 1921, Warren Harding had returned fun to the White House, resurrecting the Easter Egg Roll, the presidential tradition of throwing the baseball season’s opening pitch, and corresponding with letter writers on apolitical topics. The Easter Egg Roll had been cancelled in 1918 due to wartime egg shortages, but President…
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The Stranger Within the Gates
New York state passed its first antidiscrimination law in 1895, yet in 1921 it was still being flouted by businesses in all sorts of underhanded ways. But, of course, in actual practice, the suave young hotel clerk practices just such discriminations every day in the week. If he sees you coming and registers his inward…
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Our Kill-Joy Autocracy
Prohibition’s ratification was but one piece of evidence revealing a larger trend: by 1921, wrote columnist Charles Hanson Towne, America was being run by “killjoys.” There is one maddening phase of all this nonsense — a point that pricks a sensible citizen to the bone — and that is the fact that the minority who…
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Mrs. Grundy On the Job of Reforming the Flapper
In 1921, a debate raged among people over a certain age: how to reverse this disturbing new trend of young “flapper” women? In a general way the plans can be pigeonholed into two groups. There is the plan to chaperon [sic] the flappers on automobile rides and dances. And there is the diametrically opposed plan…