Document 2
…And what were these “own lives” of theirs [women] to be like? Well, for one thing, they could
take jobs. Up to this time girls of the middle classes who had wanted to “do something” had been
largely restricted to school-teaching, social-service work, nursing, stenography, and clerical work
in business houses. But now they poured out of the schools and colleges into all manner of new
occupations. They besieged the offices of publishers and advertisers; they went into tea-room
management until there threatened to be more purveyors [sellers] than consumers of chicken
patties and cinnamon toast; they sold antiques, sold real estate, opened smart little shops, and
finally invaded the department stores. In 1920 the department store was in the mind of the
average college girl a rather bourgeois [middle class] institution which employed “poor shop
girls”; by the end of the decade college girls were standing in line for openings in the misses’
sports-wear department and even selling behind the counter in the hope that some day fortune
might smile upon them and make them buyers or stylists. Small-town girls who once would have
been contented to stay in Sauk Center [Minnesota] all their days were now borrowing from
father to go to New York or Chicago to seek their fortunes — in Best’s or Macy’s or Marshall
Field’s. Married women who were encumbered [burdened] with children and could not seek
jobs consoled themselves with the thought that home-making and child-rearing were really
“professions,” after all. No topic was so furiously discussed at luncheon tables from one end of
the country to the other as the question whether the married woman should take a job, and
whether the mother had a right to. And as for the unmarried woman, she no longer had to
explain why she worked in a shop or an office; it was idleness, nowadays, that had to be defended.…
Source: Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 192os,
Harper & Row, 1931
According to Frederick Lewis Allen, what is one way middle-class women’s lives changed in the 192os?
