A FIRST-CLASS REVOLT AGAINST THE accepted American order was
certainly taking
place during those early years of the Post-war Decade, but it
was one with
which Nikolai Lenin had nothing whatever to do. The shock troops
of the
rebellion were not alien agitators, but the sons and daughters
of well-to-do
American families, who knew little about Bolshevism and cared
distinctly less,
and their defiance was expressed not in obscure radical
publications or in
soap-box speeches, but right across the family breakfast table
into the
horrified ears of conservative fathers and mothers. Men and
women were still
shivering at the Red Menace when they awoke to the no less
alarming Problem of
the Younger Generation, and realized that if the constitution
were not in
danger, the moral code of the country certainly was............
And what were
these "own lives" of theirs to be like? Well, for one thing,
they could take
jobs. Up to this time girls of the middle classes who had wanted
to "do
something" had been largely restricted to school- teaching,
social-service
work, nursing, stenography, and clerical work in business
houses. But now they
poured out of the schools and colleges into all manner of new
occupations. They
besieged the offices of publishers and advertisers; they went
into tea-room
management until there threatened to be more purveyors than
consumers of
chicken patties and cinnamon toast; they sold antiques, sold
real estate,
opened smart little shops, and finally invaded the department
stores. In 1920
the department store was in the mind of the average college girl
a rather
bourgeois institution which employed "poor shop girls"; by the
end of the
decade college girls were standing in line for openings in the
misses' sports-
wear department and even selling behind the counter in the hope
that some day
fortune might smile upon them and make them buyers or
stylists......... The
principal remaining forces which accelerated the revolution in
manners and
morals were all 100 per cent American. They were prohibition,
the automobile,
the confession and sex magazines, and the
movies................. For another
industry, however, the decade brought new and enormous profits.
The
manufacturers of cosmetics and the proprietors of beauty shops
had less than
nothing to complain of. The vogue of rouge and lipstick, which
in 1920 had so
alarmed the parents of the younger generation, spread swiftly to
the remotest
village. Women who in 1920 would have thought the use of paint
immoral were
soon applying it regularly as a matter of course and making no
effort to
disguise the fact; beauty shops had sprung up on every street to
give
"facials," to apply pomade and astringents, to make war against
the wrinkles
and sagging chins of age, to pluck and trim and color the
eyebrows, and
otherwise to enhance and restore the bloom of youth; and a
strange new form of
surgery, "face-lifting," took its place among the applied
sciences of the day.
Back in 1917, according to Frances Fisher Dubuc, only two
persons in the beauty
culture business had paid an income tax; by 1927 there were
18,000 firms and
individuals in this field listed as income- tax payers. The
"beautician" had
arrived." <
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/allen/ch5.html>