The major media push shifted from celebrating women doing
their duty for the nation by taking on factory jobs to celebrating them for
returning to their kitchens to care for their children and menfolk at the end
of the war. Take this cocoa ad, for example: between January and March of 1919,
the British woman moves from manual laborer to doting wife and mother.
Alongside the mainstream media preference for housebound
homemaker, though, a culture surrounding beauty and femininity sprouted up.
Makeup became a necessity for the vast majority of women, rather than for just
the very wealthy or the prostitute. A slim body became the expectation, and
women took a new interest exercise and outdoor activity. Keeping yourself
beautiful and polished became a duty rather than an expression of vanity. This
shifted expectation was another way of reminding women what their place was:
the pretty, feminine, heterosexual ideal.
In this climate, fashion became politicized, most notably in
this question: to bob, or not to bob?
Long hair was the standard for much of modern British
history. However, the 1920s witnessed the rise of the bob, the now-ubiquitous
chin-or-higher length haircut. The introduction of this cut in the early part
of the decade caused a flurry of controversy; the bob was immediately
associated with flappers, and flappers were associated with the sexually
uninhibited. Women’s magazines, which also rose to prominence during this
decade, ran constant stories on whether the bob should be attempted, and
employers would think twice before hiring a woman with the style. To bob was to
mark yourself as a Modern Woman, a positive figure for us and for those who
embraced it at the time, but an anti-Victorian troublemaker for a society
invested in keeping women home and accounted for.
