The census of 1920 revealed that for the first time a majority of Americans (54 million in a population of 106 million) lived in “urban” rather than “rural”
In Howard Thain's 1925 painting of New York's Times Square, the people are inconsequential gray blurs beneath the luminous wonders of consumption and pleasure.
Places. These figures are somewhat misleading when applied to the study of social attitudes because the census classified anyone in a community of 2,500 or more as urban. Of the 54 million “urban” residents in 1920, over 16 million lived in villages and towns of fewer than 25,000 persons and the evidence suggests strongly that a large majority of them held ideas and values more like those of rural citizens than like those of city dwellers. But the truly urban Americans, the one person in four who lived in a city of 100,000 or more—and particularly the nearly 16.4 million who lived in metropolises of at least half a million—were increasing steadily in number and influence. More than 19 million persons moved from farms to cities in the 1920s, and the population living in centers of 100,000 or more increased by about a third.
The urban environment transformed family structure, educational opportunities, and dozens of other aspects of human existence. Indeed, since most of the changes in the relations of husbands, wives, and children that had occurred in the nineteenth century were related to the fact that people were leaving farms to work in towns and cities, these trends continued and were intensified in the early twentieth century as more and more people settled in urban centers. In addition, couples continued to marry more because of love and physical attraction than because of social position, economic advantage, or the wishes of their parents. In each decade, people married slightly later in life and had fewer children.
Earlier differences between working-class and middle-class family structures persisted. In 1920 about a quarter of the American women who were working were married, but less than 10 percent of all married women were working. Middle-class married women who worked were nearly all either childless or highly paid professionals who were able to employ servants. Most male skilled workers now earned enough to support a family in modest comfort so long as they could work steadily, but an unskilled laborer still could not. Wives in most such families helped out, usually by taking in laundry or doing piecework sewing for jobbers.
By the 1920s the idea of intrafamily democracy had emerged. In such families, husbands and wives would deal with each other as equals; given existing conditions, this meant sharing housework and childcare, downplaying male authority, and stressing mutual satisfaction in sexual and other matters. On the one hand, they should be friends and lovers, not merely housekeepers, earners of money, and producers of children. On the other hand, advocates of these companionate relationships believed that there was nothing particularly sacred about marriage; divorce should be made easier for couples that did not get along, provided they did not have children.
In The Companionate Marriage (1927), Benjamin B. Lindsey, a juvenile court judge, suggested a kind of trial marriage, a period during which a young couple could get used to each other before undertaking to raise a family. By practicing contraception such couples could separate without doing serious damage to anyone if they decided to end the relationship. If the relationship remained firm and loving, it would become a traditional marriage and their children would grow up in a loving environment that would help them to become warm, well-adjusted adults.
Population Losses in the South The graph shows that whites and especially blacks were leaving the South in large numbers, especially during the 1920s. The map shows that while many urban areas in the South gained population, most rural areas lost population.
Indulgence; toilet training should begin early in infancy; thumb sucking should be suppressed; too much kissing could turn male youngsters into “mama’s boys.” “Children are made not born,” John B. Watson, a former president of the American Psychological Association who was also a vice president of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, explained in The Psychological Care of Infant and Child (1928). “Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night.”
Another school favored a more permissive approach. Toilet training could wait; parents should pay attention to their children’s expressed needs, not impose a generalized set of rules on them.
The growth of large cities further loosened social constraints on sexuality. Amidst the sea of people that surged down the streets or into the subways, the solitary individual acquired a freedom derived from anonymity. (For further perspective on urban life, see Re-Viewing the Past Chicago, pp. 644-645.) Homosexuals, in particular, developed a set of identifying signals and fashioned a distinctive culture in parks, cafeterias, nightclubs, and rooming houses of big cities. Because most others wrongly assumed that male homosexuality was characterized by effeminacy, they were unaware of the extent of the emerging gay culture. But by the late 1920s and early 1930s homosexual parades, dances, and nightclub acts had become public events.
World History
