SOCIAL CHANGE

Women saw also a new image emerge for them in the Roaring Twenties - "the flapper." Having finally gained guaranteed suffrage, with the passage of the nineteenth amendment to the Constitution, many women pushed beyond the traditional constraints placed upon them by society. Emancipated women threw out their corsets, high-laced shoes and dull floor length dresses. Skirts got shorter, necklines got longer, hair became bobbed, women wore make up, swore, and even danced and drank in public!

A woman of the roaring twenties also had new choices. She didn't necessarily have to be a housewife anymore. Instead she could choose whether to marry at all, have children, go to work or build a career. Marriage became more of a romantic choice. Equality was not prevalent in the work force, with women usually earning much less than men, even when they performed the same job. Medical schools went so far as to impose strict quotas on the number of women allowed to enter.

African Americans moved within the US as many southern blacks moved to Northern cities as part of the continuing Great Migration. The mass movement to the north led to more opportunity for blacks in the northeast and Upper Midwest - but not complete equality. Blacks responded to these conditions in different ways. Some blacks followed the ideas of Booker T. Washington, who believed that blacks had to educate and prepare themselves to survive in American society. He helped form a number of training schools where blacks could learn skills for better jobs. He also urged blacks to establish businesses and improve themselves without causing trouble with whites. Other blacks liked the stronger ideas of William Du Bois, who felt that blacks had to take firm actions to protest murders and other illegal actions. He published a magazine and spoke actively for new laws and policies to protect black rights. Du Bois also helped form a group that later became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The N.A.A.C.P. became one of the nation's leading black rights organizations in the twentieth century.

The Harlem Renaissance flowered in New York, giving African Americans a voice in a mass cultural movement. Harlem was a cultural center, drawing black writers, artists, musicians, photographers, poets, and scholars. Many had come from the South, fleeing its oppressive caste system in order to find a place where they could freely express their talents. Among those artists whose works achieved recognition were Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, Countee Cullen and Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer, Walter White and James Weldon Johnson.