Radical Changes.

Women's fashions in the 1920s reflected radical changes affecting many areas of post- World War I American society. In the first year of the decade the Nineteenth Amendment had given these women the vote, which, in turn, tended to color their expectations for their lives. Many of them rejected, at least temporarily, the traditional roles of wife and mother and instead entered the workforce of the thriving businesses of the period or enrolled in colleges and universities, which were also experiencing rapidly increasing enrollments. The working girl and the coed were typically young, simultaneously more liberated and more apparently frivolous than their mothers, and intoxicated by the attention lavished on them by the popular press. "Is the Younger Generation in Peril?" asked a long 1921 Literary Digest article. Typical of journalism investigating youth during the decade, it focused almost exclusively upon young women's...