Social Change in 1920s America: Cinema, Jazz, Women and Prohibition

The 1920s gave Americans cinema, jazz, the car and the radio, and gave women the vote. It also gave them Prohibition, which the cities simply ignored.

Cinema, jazz and mass entertainment

• Cheaper cars, radios and more free time gave ordinary Americans new ways to spend their leisure, and mass entertainment spread the same tastes across the country.
• Hollywood built a star system, turning actors like Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Rudolph Valentino into national celebrities.
• The Jazz Singer (1927) was the first major "talkie" (film with sound), and cinema audiences grew quickly through the decade.
• Jazz, coming from African American musicians, spread from clubs in cities like New York and Chicago and reached the whole country by radio, popularising artists such as Louis Armstrong.
• Fast dances like the Charleston and an informal nightlife marked a deviation from the restrained pre-war culture, especially among the young.

The changing role of women

• The 19th Amendment (1920) gave women the right to vote, a major step towards political equality.
• "Flappers" (young, mostly white, middle-class city women) cut their hair short, wore shorter skirts, smoked and danced in public, openly rejecting older ideas of how a woman should behave.
• More women took paid work in clerical jobs like typing and in shops, allowing slightly more financial independence.
• However, the change was uneven: many women were still expected to marry, keep house and defer to men, and were judged harshly for behaviour that men could get away with.
• Working-class, rural, African American and immigrant women saw far less change, so the idea of a "new woman" was mostly an urban, white and middle-class experience.

Prohibition and organised crime

• Driven by temperance campaigners, wartime patriotism and suspicion of immigrant drinking cultures, the 18th Amendment (1919) and the Volstead Act (1920) banned making, selling and transporting alcohol.
• Demand for alcohol did not stop, so it went underground:
  • Bootleggers smuggled and brewed illegal drink.
  • Speakeasies (secret bars) spread through the cities.
• Organised crime grew rich on the trade, with gangsters like Al Capone running bootlegging empires in Chicago and using violence such as the 1929 St Valentine's Day Massacre to control it.
• Only about 2,000 federal agents policed the whole country and bribery of police and officials was widespread, so the law was broken openly and respect for it fell.
• Prohibition split rural "dry" America, which backed the ban on moral grounds, from urban "wet" America, which ignored it, and the failure led to repeal by the 21st Amendment in 1933.