TGG - Context

- The nations total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, economic growth swept many Americans into an affluent but unfamiliar "consumer society"

- Many Americans were uncomfortable with the new, urban, racy "mass culture" of the 1920s, for many the 1920s brought more conflict than celebration. 

- The decade marked the flourishing of the modern mass-production, mass-consumption ecomonomy, which delivered fantastic profits to investors while also raising the livign standard of the urban middle - and working-class. 

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- The Flapper : a young woman with bobbed hair and short skirts who drank, smoked and said what migt be termed 'unladylike' in addition to more casual attitudes towards sexual freedom. 

- Most young women of the 1920s were not Flapper girls, but they still gained some unprecedened freedoms:

•   they could vote at last - the 19th Amendment to the consitution had guaranteed that right in 1920.
• Millions of women worked in white-collar jobs (as stenographers for example) and so could afford to participate in the burgeoning consumer economy. 
• The increased availbality of the diaphram made it possible for woman to have sex freely and fewer children. 
• New machines and technologies like the washing machine and the vacuum cleaner eliminated some of the drudgery of household work. 

- In the 1920s many Americans had extra money to spend, and they spent it on consumer goods such as ready-to-wear clothes and home appliances like electrical refrigerators. In particular, they bought radios. 

- By the end of the 1920s there radios in more than 12 million households. 

- Historians esitmate that, by the end of the decades, 3/4 of the American population visited a movie theatre every week.

- The most important consumer product of the 1920s was the automobile. Low prices ( Ford model T cost $260 in 1924C) and generous credit made cars afforable luxuries at the beginning of the decade; by the end, they were practically necessities. In 1929 there was one car on the road for every 5 Americans. 

- Cars gave young people the freedom of travel and to do what they wanted. 

- What many young people wanted to do was dance: the Charleston, the cake walk, the black bottom, the fela hop. Jazz bands played at hallds like the Savoy in NYC. 

- SOme older people objected to jazz music's 'vulgarity' and 'depravity' and the moral disasters it supposedly inspired, but many of the younger generation loved the genre and associated freedom.