Historical Context for Films of the 1920s

The 1920s witnessed dramatic social and economic changes; it also saw critiques of and resistance to those changes.  Historians have characterized the decade as "the New Era."

Economic Changes: A Booming Economy Connected to Technology

• Production rising by 60% during the 1920s.
• Income increasing by one third.
• Technology and related industries a major source of economic growth
• Automobiles (related industries of steel, rubber, and oil)--Female depicting this industry.
• Radio
• Commercial aviation--Lindbergh's departure for solo trans-Atlantic flight as subject for Movietone sound short; airplane seen in Mantrap.
• Trains and telephones became more advanced and widespread.
• Shift in how businesses were organized, with a movement toward national organization and consolidation.

Consumerism

• "Consumer society," with shift to buying for convenience or pleasure rather than necessity.  Appliances and autos purchased in increasing numbers.
• Emergence of advertising as an industry.  Advertisers using psychological theories to plan campaigns and mass media, including magazines, radio, and film, to disseminate ads (film audience increasing from 40 million total in 1920 to 100 million by 1930).

• Spread significantly in the 1920s in response to feeling that modern era presented complex challenges not experienced by previous generations that lived in a "simpler" time. 
• Anxiety and alienation recognized as prevalent psychological characteristics of 1920s' society.
• Theory of "dynamic" psychiatry focused on therapy for those with typical anxieties; movement away from psychology/psychiatry as only for the treatment of the mentally ill.

• Increasingly in labor force, specifically in "pink collar" service professions.  Middle-class women remaining in home or in "female" professions such as nursing and teaching.
• Psychological redefinition of motherhood challenged the notion that women were "naturally" maternalistic.
• Relationships, particularly sexual relationships between husbands and wives, gaining increased attention.
• Birth control as public issue, with Margaret Sanger promoting the use of the diaphragm.
• Shifting morality:  away from Victorian respectability for women.  The Flapper as icon for new morality for women.  The Flapper smoked, drank, danced, and attended wild parties; the Flapper's moral stance impacted mainly lower and working-class women (for example, the character of Alverna in Mantrap).
• Relation to class films
• Driving as metaphor for female independence and morality in Female (Harriet driving alone and Alison wanted to travel the same road as men).
• Diana's toast to herself in Our Dancing Daughters--women's judgment of themselves as important value.
• Wild parties and dancing in Our Dancing Daughters, Our Modern Maidens, and Mantrap.
• Female sexuality, with women seducing men in all films.  Lack of punishment for sexuality (unlike Edith in The Cheat).

• Critiques of consumption, excess, the success ethic and New Era alienation leveled by novelists such as Lewis and Fitzgerald.
• Resistance to shifting moral terrain coming in the form of temperance movement (Prohibition--18th Amendment--passed in 1919), nativist movements, and religious conflict between modernists and fundamentalists.