History 476

Devine

Spring 2016

Study Questions: 1920s Youth Culture

Paula Fass, “Sex and Youth in the Jazz Age”

1. What factors led to the emergence of “dating” during the 1920s? How did “dating” change relations between men and women?

2. Some adults feared that teenage “dating” would lead to sexual promiscuity. Why does Fass say their fear “was unfounded”?

3. How did young people’s views about sexuality differ from those of their parents who were raised during the Victorian era? In what ways did young people’s attitudes remain somewhat consistent with their parents’?

4. In what ways did relations between men and women become more informal during the 1920s?

5. Why were “bobbed hair,” short skirts, and cosmetics controversial topics during the 1920s? What deeper fears lay beneath expressions of opposition to such things?

6. How did young people respond to prohibition? When was drinking “ok”? When was it not “ok”?

7. What had changed about the ways people drank (and the places they dranks) between the Victorian era and the 1920s?

8. Why does Fass believe that the “flaming youth” of the 1920s may have appeared rebellious to their elders but were not really rebels at all?

Kevin White, “Modern American Male Heterosexuality: The 1920s

1. Why did the new “peer-led sexual mores” that emerged in the 1920s leave young men uncertain and anxious as to how to behave (or “perform”) toward women?

2. How was “dating” different than the Victorian-era practice of “calling”?

3. What role did the movies play in teaching young men to “perform”?

4. What evidence does the author cite to show that some men rejected the “double standard” that insisted women (and not men) remain “pure”?

5. Why did men want clearly defined “sexual boundaries”?

6. Why did the dating system seem to benefit “bad” men of low character? How did they abuse the new power the system gave them – in their talk and in their behavior?

7. How did the new dating system work against men – especially when it came to finances?

8. Why did it matter that no new model of the “New Man” arose to complement that of the “New Woman”?