The Roaring Twenties "Jazz Age" Themes of the 1920s - Revolution in Manners and Morals
New Woman: To many, the "new woman" personified the radical changes taking place in American society. Women, particularly young fashionable women called "flappers" frequented speakeasies, drank and smoked with men, danced the Charleston and Black Bottom, and spoke freely of sex. While most women of the 1920s were not flappers, there is little doubt that their lives had changed. Women were now voting, practicing birth control, getting college educations (even if college was a means to further their husband's careers), entering the workplace, driving automobiles, and divorcing in larger numbers than before. One in six marriages would end in divorce. These changes would have broad ramifications for American society. [On flappers, see "Flapper Jane" Culture of Modernism Such social indications of modernity were paralled in science and literature. Einstein's theory of relativity, Marx's emphasis on materialism, Darwin's biological findings, Freud's theories of sexuality shattered old intellectual constructs of the world as knowable and certain. New trends in science shook the faith in rational, absolute values. Increasingly values themselves would become relative. Modernist Literature American expatriate writers and intellectuals fled in the 1920s to Europe, especially Paris. It would be these writers that best articulated the modernist disillustionment with the world. Industrialization had begun the process of alienation for this "lost generation," the war completed it. Among these expatriates would be some of America's best writers and poets: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner. Their work resonated such themes as the inability of man to control his fate, the loss of faith, and a search for meaning in an irrational world. It would be Fitzgerald who would note that his generation had grown up to find all gods dead, all the wars fought, all faith in man shaken. Hemingway's
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