Intermediate between the home and work (or the school) there are certain organized influences for giving pleasure and information—the motion picture, the newspaper, the light periodical—which define the situation in equivocal terms. They enter the home and are dependent upon its approval, and are therefore obliged to present life in episodes which depict the triumph of virtue. But if they limited themselves to this they would be dull. The spectacle therefore contains a large and alluring element of sin over which virtue eventually triumphs. The moral element is preserved nominally but the real interest and substance is something else.
46. A young girl may be taught at home and church that chastity is a virtue, but the newspapers and the movies feature women in trouble along this line, now painting them as heroines, now sobbing over their mystery and pathos. Apparently they get all the attention and attention is the life blood of youth. The funny papers ridicule marriage, old maids and bashful men. The movies, magazines, street conversation and contemporary life are filled with the description of lapses that somehow turn out safely and even luxuriously. If the modern young girl practises virtue she may not believe in it. The preliminaries to wrong-doing are apparently the accepted manners of the time. When the girl herself lapses it is frequently because of lack of a uniform, authoritative definition of the social code.[[48]]
Among well-to-do girls a new type has been differentiated, characterized by youth, seeming innocence, sexual sophistication and a relatively complete de-pudorization.
47. The modern age of girls and young men is intensely immoral, and immoral seemingly without the pressure of circumstances. At whose door we may lay the fault, we cannot tell. Is it the result of what we call “the emancipation of woman”, with its concomitant freedom from chaperonage, increased intimacy between the sexes in adolescence, and a more tolerant viewpoint toward all things unclean in life? This seems the only logical forbear of the present state. And are the girls causing it now, or the men? Each sex will lay the blame on the heads, or passions, of the other, and perhaps both sexes are equally at fault.
Whosesoever the fault may be (and that is not such an important question, since both sexes are equally immoral), the whole character of social relations among younger people is lamentable. The modern dances are disgusting—the “toddle” and its variations and vibrations, the “shimmy” and its brazen pandering to the animal senses, and the worst offspring of jazz, the “camel-walk.” There is but one idea predominant in these dances—one that we will leave unnamed.
It is not only in dancing that this immorality appears. The modern social bud drinks, not too much often, but enough; smokes considerably, swears unguardedly, and tells “dirty” stories. All in all, she is a most frivolous, passionate, sensation-seeking little thing.[[49]]
48. “Flappers” usually are girls who believe personality is physical, who consider all advice as abstract, who love continual change, who converse in generalities and who are in many higher institutions of learning.
To present a picture of the normal girl as she exists today is a daring venture. She has no average, she has no group tie. She is a stranger to herself—sometimes especially to members of her own family—and cannot be compared with her kind of a previous age.
We are tempted to think of her as living in a spirit of masquerade, so rapidly and completely can she assume different and difficult rôles of accomplishment.
She tantalizes us by the simpleness of her artfulness and yet unrealness. We find her light-hearted, which is the privilege of youth. She believes with Stevenson that to have missed the joy is to have missed it all. We find her harboring secrets and imbedded emotions which are her hidden treasure in the mysterious discovery of herself as a private individual. If we do not understand these symptoms we call it temperament and try to dispose of the girl as difficult or as needing discipline.[[50]]