A social and force in the changing roles of women was consumerism which took off in the 1920’s and continued to have an impact on women until the 60’s/70’s, which to a small extent gave women an increased sense of independence, through working and self-expression. Industrialisation and the growth of cities laid the platform for mass consumerism in America, by the 1920s, the development of downtown department stores gave accessibility to a vast array of new goods and cities became the centre of cultural change. Mass entertainment was also popular with amusement parks, dance halls and movie theatres resulting in a new visibility of women in the public sphere. The department and chain stores created accessibility to an array of new goods. Women …show more content…
vacuum cleaners) halved the time it took to do housework thus, women had time for paid work, without sacrificing their domestic duties. The media and Hollywood significantly shaped the rise in mass culture enhancing the domestic image of women that was present in the 1900’s. The most watched show at the time, “I Love Lucy”, portrayed woman as the stereotypical woman-in-distress, symbolic of the inept woman: the "woman driver," the "over-spender" who cannot budget’ the basic downfall of man. Feminine magazines encouraged domestic behaviours, such as baking a cake and refusing a professional opportunity to stay at home and by 1915 women were doing 80-85% of customer purchasing. Despite this there was a significant increase in women working with twice as many women working in 1960 as they had in 1940. The median age of women workers had risen to forty-one, and the number of wives at work had doubled from 15 percent in 1940 to 30 percent in …show more content…
Perhaps the main transformation experienced by working women was the new image that they had of themselves: they saw that they could have independence creating confidence in their capacities as women and as professionals. Through the idea that work was something for women to “fall back on” was widespread and it was presumed work was something a woman would do if necessary. However most women were part-time workers, which demonstrates that the home and family were still their priorities. Women were represented in almost every 446 professions listed by the 1955 census, but very few of them had important or leading positions, most of them were doing jobs that men didn’t want to do or that were qualified as “women’s occupations”. Therefore, while socially it was becoming increasingly acceptable for women to work, allowing them to work. To a greater extent, being the ideal homemaker was their primary focus. However Historian Leach argued that the culture of consumption also had freeing impacts on women “not only made women’s lives more secular and public, it also gave women the opportunity to express themselves as individuals”. This is clear in the Flapper; symbolic of liberalism and feminism in defying the traditional roles of women in US society as well as challenging the notion of commitment to religion and modesty. Despite this, Historian Boyer, argues that in the long-term