Making party favors from peanuts is just one example of what was considered women’s work in 1920s America. Photo credit: Jeff Miller

A Woman’s World in 1920s America

Careful what you wish for, nostalgia buffs

Blind nostalgia for the 1950s afflicts many Americans, some of whom weren’t around to experience that era’s crushing conformity and chauvinism. No matter. It’s enough, they say, that men were men and women were women. Everybody knew their place and the traditional nuclear family reigned supreme.

But if that’s your ideal, why stop there? Why not return to the even fiercer traditionalism of the 1920s instead?

While jazz-loving flappers with bobbed hair and “loose morals” are the popular stereotypes of the era, most middle-class women in the 1920s filled their time with cooking, child-rearing, clubs, social gatherings, housekeeping, and recipe sharing.

My paternal grandmother, a 32-year-old housewife with two young sons when Warren G. Harding was elected president in 1920, exemplified that traditional lifestyle. I know this because she left behind a binder full of newspaper articles and announcements, letters, personal notes, recipes, party planning advice, birthday cards, and a long list of other ephemera.

The artifacts send a clear message. For all the cultural changes that defined the 1920s — be they a woman’s right to vote, the emergence of women doctors and entrepreneurs, or popular film sirens flaunting their…