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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
When Anita Loos wrote her best-selling novels, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1928), American women were in a state of flux. Buoyed by the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, many middle-class and upper-class women expected to play a larger role in public life. Nonetheless, men expected women to undertake the same roles of wife and mother as women of previous generations — a demand that put many women and men in conflict. While suffrage had not eliminated the myths and beliefs that bound women earlier in the century, women believed they had tools similar to those implicitly endorsed by Horatio Alger, such as education and determination, to enable them to move into the public sphere.
1. The literature on women in the United States is enormous. For a general background see Banner, Lois W., Women in Modern America: a Brief History (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 2nd ed., 153, esp. ch. 4, “The 1920s: Freedom or Disillusionment?”Google Scholar Also important is Nancy F. Cott, who takes on similar issues but focuses on different rhetoric (The Grounding of Modern Feminism [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987]Google Scholar). Her work is more about feminism; I am more concerned with women and the American success ideology. See also Lemons, J. StanleyThe Woman Citizen (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1973), esp. ch. 9Google Scholar; Evans, Sara M., Born For Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1989), esp. ch. 8Google Scholar; and Chafe, William H., The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972)Google Scholar. For the political origin of the Equal Rights Amendment and particularly the story of the National Woman's Party, see Becker, Susan, The Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment: American Feminism Between the Wars (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981)Google Scholar; see also Lunardini, Christine A., From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights: Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party (New York: New York University Press, 1986)Google Scholar. Also, this work is part of a larger, unpublished manuscript that compares the experiences of women, immigrants, and African-Americans in this period.
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