Silk Dresses, Steel Minds: How Suffrage forged Modern Womanhood
By Amelia Berns
NEWS
Edited by Hannah Mae Webster
6/28/20263 min read
©The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County
When asked to picture a woman from the 1920s, many will instantly conjure up the same memorable image. However, the influence of these remarkable women surpassed style alone. Say hello to the decade that made feminism fashionable.
Flappers, as the subculture was branded, were the visible result of decades of resistance; as much a cause as a reflection of broader social and political shifts. The emergence of the flapper was tied to the social disruptions of WWI. As women entered industrial labour, offices, and public life in unprecedented numbers, traditional expectations began to fracture.
Victorian values of chastity and submission were rejected, along with the general conservatism of the era. Flappers embraced jazz, dancing energetically at nightclubs and speakeasies during the US prohibition. Distinctive fashions signalled an open attitude towards sexuality and independence. This was more than a sudden cultural rebellion – it was triggered by the changing landscape of women’s rights, adding momentum and glamour to organised political activism.
In Britain and Ireland, suffrage had been around for some time, most prominently represented by the figurehead of Emmeline Pankhurst. The ‘Women’s Social and Political Union’, the ‘Women’s Freedom League’, and the ‘National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies’, were all fighting for legal equality. A goal for which these women were frequently imprisoned under harsh conditions. In the US, the ‘National Women’s Party’ around Alice Paul had staged the Silent Sentinels in favour of the vote outside the White House from 1917 to 1919.
The 1920s granted women the right to vote in the US with the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920. Britain had given voting rights to women over 30 in 1918, and then to women over 21 in 1928, equalising voting rights with men.
However, progress was neither uniform nor uncontested. Everyday realities lagged behind these advances. What worked for Marlene Dietrich, didn’t necessarily work for women in the typing pool of a large textile factory. Discrimination in the workplace, social resistance, and structural exclusion continued to limit who could fully benefit from the promises of the ‘Roaring Twenties’, this allegedly golden age.
The ‘New Woman’ symbolised shifting expectations, rather than settled equality. Independence, physical autonomy, and equal political power were still distant.
The vote was only the start of a far more contested inclusion process.
Conservative initiatives against feminist and progressive convictions had loomed from the very beginning. Women like Josephine Jewell Dodge in the US sought to reaffirm traditional gender roles, advocating domesticity, moral reform, and restricted female labour. To many, social change threatened traditional family structures and national stability. Ideological struggle over women’s place in society was rife.
Racial discrimination, class barriers, and restrictive immigration laws meant that these legal and cultural advances were unevenly distributed. In the US, many women of colour remained effectively excluded from political participation despite formal voting rights, while working-class women faced economic precarity. The promise of progress remained conditional.
The ‘New Woman’ was not a universal reality. She remained, for the most part, an image circulated in magazines, advertisements, and urban social scenes, reflecting possibilities primarily available to middle and upper-class women. Her visibility underscored both opportunity and exclusion, highlighting the gap between aspirational ideals and structural constraints.
Today, the questions raised by the 1920s remain strikingly relevant. Legal recognition alone cannot guarantee equality, and subcultural symbolism and style can both reveal and obscure systemic barriers. Debates over reproductive rights and the rise in trends like the ‘Trad Wife’, indicate that the negotiation of gender roles is far from settled.
Progress is rarely linear. It is contested, uneven, and Sisyphusian. The tremendous backlash we’re witnessing in the US tells us one thing: nothing is sealed and settled. The fight goes on. And we haven’t even touched on the conditions beyond our “enlightened” Western bubble.
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