Fredrick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday (1931)

Only Yesterday addresses the history of America from the First World War to after the Great Crash. 

In Chapter 5 – which you can read in full here, and are encouraged to do so – it provides a lively and interesting account of the ‘revolution in manners and morals’ during the 1920s. 

Allen highlights the growing independence of American women, who increasingly entered the workforce and embraced new social freedoms –  a change accompanied by a rise in behaviours previously considered improper. 

He also identifies a significant shift in the American feminine ideal, moving away from the modest, demure woman of the past to a more vibrant and assertive figure.  Women's fashion became more daring, with shorter skirts and bobbed hair symbolizing their liberation.  Cosmetics gained popularity as women sought to enhance their appearance, challenging traditional notions of femininity. 

All this applied especially to young women.  Allen describes how F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel This Side of Paradise had alerted parents to the emergence of petting parties, where young people engaged in intimate behaviour in social settings, and danced “as if glued together, body to body, cheek to cheek”.  A newfound frankness about sex and relationships marked a departure from the restrained attitudes of earlier generations.  The automobile played a crucial role in this shift, providing a private space for young couples away from parental supervision. 

Allen blamed a range of causes of the revolution: the eat-drink-and-be-merry-for-tomorrow-we-die spirit of the war years, the sense of independence given by getting the vote, the easing of household drudgeries, prohibition speakeasies, racy magazines … and Sigmund Freud for focussing everyone’s attention on sex. 

He also addresses the backlash from conservative groups who viewed these changes as a threat to traditional values, as critics decried the loss of morality and the perceived decline in social standards. 

Allen considered the 1920s a decade born in disillusionment, ill-mannered … and also unhappy.  He finishes by suggesting that by 1929 the revolution had burned itself out, and that people were “once more learning to be at home in their world … to live the freer and franker life of this new era gracefully, and to discover among the ruins of the old dispensation a new set of enduring satisfactions.”

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Some Quotes:

“The flappers wore thin dresses, short-sleeved and occasionally (in the evening) sleeveless; some of the wilder young things rolled their stockings below their knees, revealing to the shocked eyes of virtue a fleeting glance of shin-bones and knee-cap , and many of them were visibly using cosmetics.”

“Cried the Catholic Telegraph of Cincinnati in righteous indignation: 'The music is sensuous, the embracing of partners – the female only half dressed – is absolutely indecent; and the motions – they are such as may not be described, with any respect for propriety, in a family newspaper'.”

“Supposedly 'nice' girls were smoking cigarettes – openly and defiantly, if often rather awkwardly and self-consciously.  They were drinking – somewhat less openly but often all too efficaciously There were stories of daughters of the most exemplary parents getting drunk – ' blotto,' as their companions cheerfully put it – on the contents of the hip-flasks of the new prohibition regime, and going out joyndmg with men at four in the morning.”

“Innumerable families were torn with dissension over cigarettes and gm and all-night automobile rides.  Fathers and mothers lay awake asking themselves whether their children were not utterly lost; sons and daughters evaded questions, lied miserably and unhappily, or flared up to reply rudely that at least they were not dirty-minded hypocrites, that they saw no harm in what they were doing and proposed to go right on doing it.”

““The revolution was accelerated also by the growing independence of the American woman...  The winning of the suffrage had its effect.  It consolidated woman's position as man's equal.”

“Even more marked was the effect of woman's growing independence of the drudgeries of house-keeping...  Women were slowly becoming emancipated from routine to 'live their own lives'.”

“And what were these 'own lives'of theirs to be like?  Well, for one thing.  they could take up jobs.  With the job – or at least the sense that the job was a possibility – came a feeling of comparative economic independence.  With the feeling of economic independence came a slackening of husbandly and parental authority.”

“Meanwhile a new sort of freedom was being made possible by the enormous increase in the use of the automobile, and particularly of the closed car.  The automobile offered an almost universally available means of escaping temporarily from the supervision of parents and chaperons, or from the influence of neighbourhood opinion.  The Lynds quoted the judge of the juvenile court in 'Middletown' as declanng that the automobile had become a 'house of prostitution on wheels'.”

“Not content with the freedom of short and skimpy clothes, women sought, too, the freedom of short hair.  During the early years of the decade the bobbed head – which in 1918 had been regarded as a sign of radicalism – became increasingly frequent among young girls, chiefly on the ground of convenience.”

“These changes in fashion – the short skin, the boyish form, the straight, long-waisted dresses, the frank use of pamt – were signs of a real change m the American feminine ideal (as well, perhaps, as in men's idea of what was the feminine ideal).  Women were bent on freedom – freedom to work and to play without the trammels that had bound them heretofore to lives of comparative inactivity.”

“In effect, the woman of the Post-war Decade said to man, 'You are tired and disillusioned, you do not want the cares of a family or the companionship of mature wisdom, you want excit-ting play, you want the thrills of sex without their fruition, and I will give them to you.' And to herself she added, 'But I will be free'.”

“One of the most striking results of the revolution was a widely pervasive obsession with sex.  To listen to the conversation or some of the sons and daughters of Mr and Mrs Grundy was to be reminded of the girl whose father said that she would talk about anything, in fact, she hardly ever talked about anything else The public attitude toward any number.”

“[Alcohol] lubricated a new outspokenness between men and women.  An upheaval in values was taking place.  Modesty, reticence, and chivalry were going out of style; women no longer wanted to be 'ladylike' or could appeal to their daughters to be 'wholesome', it was too widely suspected that the old-fashioned lady had been a sham and that the 'wholesome' girl was merely inhibiting a nasty mind and would come to no good end.  'Victorian' and 'Puritan' were becoming terms of opprobrium.”

“A time of revolution, however, is an uneasy time to hve in...  Manners became not merely different, but – for a few years unmannerly.  The new code had been born in disillusionment, and beneath all the bravado of its exponents and the talk about entering upon a new era the disillusionment persisted.  If the decade was ill-mannered, it was also unhappy With the old order of things had gone a set of values which had given richness and meaning to life, and substitute values were not easily found.  If morality was dethroned, world was crumbling...  And so the saxophones wailed and the gin-flask went its rounds and the dancers made their treadmill circuit with half-closed eyes, and the outside world, so merciless and so insane, was shut away for a restless night.”

Fredrick Lewis Allen was the editor-in-chief of the famous Harper’s Magazine, a biographer and historian of American society. 

Only Yesterday has been criticised: Nathan Miller (2010) felt it had "certain defects" – it contains little hard data, and it "neglected blacks" – whilst Lawrence Nelson, though he accepted it as 'pathbreaking' and 'a virtual classic', suggested that the book, 'while not untrue' created stereotypes of certain of the decades' traits.

Neverthless, modern historians such as Kim Nielsen (2001), Robinson & Ruff (2011), and Rebecca DeWolf (2021) even today cite him as a source, and Catherine Gourlay devoted two pages to Allen's interpretation of female Manner and Morals in her book: Flappers and the New American Woman (2008).