New york city jazz clubs 1920s11/6/2023 ![]() ![]() Harding became the first president to address the nation by radio-and three years later there were more than 500 stations in the nation. The first commercial radio station in the United States, Pittsburgh’s KDKA, hit the airwaves in 1920. Fashion, Fads and Film Starsĭuring the 1920s, many Americans had extra money to spend-and spend it they did, on movies, fashion and consumer goods such as ready-to-wear clothing and home appliances like electric refrigerators. Rumor had it that the Yale Club in New York City had a 14-year supply of booze in its basement. And with this electrification came new machines and technologies like the washing machine, the freezer and the vacuum cleaner eliminated some of the drudgeries of household work.ĭid you know? Because the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act did not make it illegal to drink alcohol, only to manufacture and sell it, many people stockpiled liquor before the ban went into effect. In 1912, an estimated 16 percent of American households had electricity by the mid-1920s, more than 60 percent did. The increased availability of birth-control devices such as the diaphragm made it possible for women to have fewer children. Millions of women worked in blue-collar jobs, as well as white-collar jobs (as stenographers, for example) and could afford to participate in the burgeoning consumer economy. They could vote at last: The 19th Amendment to the Constitution had guaranteed that right in 1920, though it would be decades before Black women in the South could fully exercise their right to vote without Jim Crow segregation laws. In reality, most young women in the 1920s did none of these things (though many did adopt a fashionable flapper wardrobe), but even those women who were not flappers gained some unprecedented freedoms. Perhaps the most familiar symbol of the “Roaring Twenties” is probably the flapper: a young woman with bobbed hair and short skirts who drank, smoked and said “unladylike” things, in addition to being more sexually “free” than previous generations.
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