The 1920s

The 1920s: Roaring or tame? | Podcast | History Extra

"When the men came back in 1918, they got their jobs back, simply for 2 reasons: the unions were too strong. Because many employers wanted to keep women on for 2 reasons: they were seen as more docile and also they were much cheaper...

In 1917, Lloyd George said: we are facing 3 enemies: the Germans, the Austrians and drink. And drink is the worst... he brought in what was probably one of the strangest laws in 1917, that you couldn't go to a bar and buy someone else a drink. You could only buy yourself a drink...

In terms of population, we have, it pretty much rights itself in 1920, people psychologically felt it hadn't righted itself. They felt there were much more women than men... much more young women than men.

And they felt that these women were never going to get married, so they had to make their own fun and they had to go out and work. So they didn't spend, they didn't save up their money for when they became good housewives. They spent on clothes, they spent on makeup, they spent on the cinema and they spent it on dancing. And also they spent it on going to speakeasies, because even though these were not very moral places, they were absolutely filled with women, because they'd be no fun without them.

The new woman. She cuts her hair, she's glamorous, she's exciting. And she openly wears makeup and this doesn't make her a prostitute...

Steamboat Willy... 1929, the beginning of Mickey Mouse. And what's very striking about Mickey Mouse here is he's not a film for children. This is a film for adults. What becomes the hallmark of a children's film, for example extreme violence towards cats and swinging Minnie Mouse round by her bloomers, is jokes for adults but they become vital to this film for children. So the beginning of the Walt Disney of the dream of the cartoon...

If we look at the 1920s and we say women and men didn't want to get married, they wanted to have fun. They didn't want to spend their money on settling down, on buying a house, on buying a baby cradle. So we have this, what seems a soaring divorce rate - or 8 per 1,000, and a refusal to get married, of a late marriage among women.

This completely changes almost overnight after the Depression and people get married very quickly. So it's very interesting, and this is across the board that in times of... boom, we shorten our skirts and we don't get married. And in times of bust, we lengthen our skirts and we start getting married, and we start having babies.

And that's very striking because there's nothing more expensive... than a baby, whatever time you live in. It's the most expensive thing you can have. You simply can't buy as many lipsticks and silver, beautiful films in the 1920s. However many lipsticks and however many flapper dresses you buy, it's not as much as a baby's going to cost. And that's the same, I'd say now, in 2015, how expensive small children are.

And yet the birth rate absolutely soars during times of depression, and so does the marriage and settling down rate. And as a consequence of that, that human behavior that's what gets us out of depression. So the fact is that we all start settling down, we start getting married, we start having children and that generates a huge amount of income in itself because we spend so much money on baby cradles and houses and all the rest of it.

But even when, even although change their behavior with the beginning of the Great Depression, that wasn't enough and it took the Second World War and the aftermath really to get us out of the Depression"


Many liberals mock the economic argument that capitalism will provide pressure to eliminate wage discrimination (e.g. the gender wage gap) because profit-maximising companies would rather hire cheaper labour to do the same tasks. Yet this is empirical proof of this phenomenon