Essay on Cheap Amusements

American culture changed at the turn of the century due to a challenging reestablished social order. Coney Island at the beginning of the twentieth century had a profound impact on societal norms. Outside of Coney Island, women were often treated as inferior while men ruled the throne in nearly all aspects of life. However, within Coney Island the gender gap was equalized. Coney Island served as a medium to a change in the traditional mindset. Here, the hotels, amusement parks, and rides and events that the civilians encountered a display of immorality, fast pleasure and love for profit. As Kasson states "At the turn of the century the nation was beginning a pivotal transition form an economy organized around production to one organized

Also, women generally socialized with one another, it was unheard of for a woman and a man to socialize unless her husband was with her.

At the start of the decade, society and the way people lived changed drastically. Women specifically were viewed in a different way. Before the 1920s, women were portrayed as the “typical housewife”. Women were supposed to stay home, cook, clean, and raise the children. During the 1920s, women were changing the culture and the stereotype of a “typical housewife”. Women began to go

The book Amusing the Million was written by John F. Kasson. Kasson is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He teaches Emeritus of History and American Studies. He got his AB at Harvard University in 1966 and his PhD at Yale University in 1971. Kasson has several publications such as; Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (1978), Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (1990), Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776 – 1900 (1999), Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (2001), and The Little Girl who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and the 1930s America (2014). Amusing the Million examines the historical context in which Coney Island made its reputation as an amusement park and shows how America’s changing social and economic conditions formed the basis of a new mass culture.

(Schaller 592) From the poor work conditions, the immigration levels continued to grow thus feeding the endless cycle. With the new flow of immigrants, meant the rise of a younger generation who would cut ties with the older traditions.  Some young working women turned against parental rules, and control. The gained their independence by keeping money for themselves to spend on clothes and go out and socialize, in ways that previous generations hadn’t. They also rejected the normal things such as arranged marriages, embracing more American ways of love. (Schaller 631) Middle class women began to embrace this style and it became known as the “New Woman.” They slowly began to move away from what was then the ideal woman, and become more athletically involved in things such as: hiking, camping, bicycling, tennis, and many other sports. (Schaller 634) Soon after they broke away from their stereotypical housewife facade, they began to raise their voices on controversial issues other than women’s rights.  Jane Addams was inspired by her stay at Toynbee

Social change in 1920s America was fundamental to the era earning the name the ‘Roaring Twenties’. It quickly became the societal norm to enjoy lavish parties, excessive alcohol despite the prohibition laws and dancing to new rhythmic jazz music. The social change was most evident in the roles of women. Before the First World War, women were restricted to being homemakers. Few, if any, women were employed and they never attended parties without a chaperone. During the war, however, women had enjoyed new freedom as they worked in factories while their husbands and fathers were at war. This sort of work in heavy industry encouraged freer behavior and women began smoking and drinking in public and going out unchaperoned. Fitzgerald’s depiction of Jordan Baker and Daisy Buchanan reflects the new woman of the 1920s. Indeed, even Jordan Baker’s name is unisex, reflecting the changing roles of women as they defy society’s expectations and enjoy more masculine pursuits. This new found freedom slipped into decadence, allowing parties such as Gatsby’s to be much less reserved as Nick observes women falling back upon men

The Market Revolution and the Second Great Awakening promoted the ideas of social mobility and and individualism which greatly influenced the shaping of gender roles in America in the mid 1800’s. Work and the home were now separated which made womens new job taking care of the house and family, they could work elsewhere such as in factories, but were paid less than men and worked long, hard hours, women’s place in society was changing, women began to challenge the rules of fashion and fight for their rights.

Paul Johnson utilizes monograph to recount the story of Sam Patch, an intoxicated working class spinner who got praised for leaping off waterfalls in the late 1820s. In spite of the fact that the chronicled record is spotty, Johnson arranges Patch inside an arrangement of more extensive subjects dependent upon the areas of his bounced. To start with, experiencing childhood in the factory town of Pawtucket, Johnson tells an account of seized patriarchy: Sam's father was a craftsman shoemaker who lost his business in the face of industrialization. This was some piece of a more extensive story of the rise of compensation work and diminishing area holding, both of which served to undermine the control and position of fathers. After the grown-up Sam Patch moves to Paterson, NJ, he does his first public/political hops. To begin with, he bounced to undermine the opening festival of a center privileged nature hold assembled by a neighborhood ambitious person who was attempting to prohibit the working population from his more cultured ideas of relaxation. Johnson utilizes the fairly interesting story of Sam Patch and his ascent to celebrity to investigate various expansive progressions happening in America throughout this time period. Industrialization, Rise of popular, self-made celebrity culture, Sam Patch as Jacksonian democracy - Whig vision vs. Democratic vision, Rise of wage labor mirroring decline of patriarchy are all wide-ranging changes that happen during the late

With the center of production moving from households to mass-production, women in America had to alter their way of life. A great number of women followed labor opportunities to the mills, factories, and workshops. For the first time in history, large numbers of women left their homes to participate in the public world. “Mill Girls” were typically young, unmarried women who lived together in boarding houses provided by the factory for which they worked. Lucy Larcom recalls,

First, the jobs these people had to have were terrible and didn’t make them much money. Some people’s jobs included guarding the fence at the county fair, cut the boy’s hair from in the neighborhood, pick peaches, and last but not least, one guy “painted Don Albright’s house for $5.00.” As stated in passage 1 paragraph 3. Those are just some of the terrible jobs they had.

The 1920’s was an era of dramatic political and cultural change, where many Americans lived in cities rather than farms. Many inventors came to be noticed as new cars were invented and as music entered the entertainment industry. A new style of music was invented mainly in the African American community, creating the Harlem Renaissance; which was an evolution of music and entertainment in Harlem, New York City. The women of America began to evolve in the 1920s, adding new styles to our fashion industry and changing the way women dress, act, and are portrayed in society for generations. Women were viewed before the 1920’s as innocent housewives, that made little to no money, as they often relied on their husbands’ for income. Women also had little to no rights, such as voting rights, which many women began to protest. Women of the 1920’s through the 1930’s influenced and impacted society by transforming their looks from innocent housewives to a sexually liberated generation of women, increasing the working rate to twenty-five percent by working in factories and the telemarketing business, and participating in the Women’s Suffrage Movement in which they protested for their rights which then influenced the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Frederick Lewis Allen, in his famous chronicle of the 1920s Only Yesterday, contended that women’s “growing independence” had accelerated a “revolution in manners and morals” in American society (95). The 1920s did bring significant changes to the lives of American women. World War I, industrialization, suffrage, urbanization, and birth control increased women’s economic, political, and sexual freedom. However, with these advances came pressure to conform to powerful but contradictory archetypes. Women were expected to be both flapper and wife, sex object and mother. Furthermore, Hollywood and the emerging “science” of advertising increasingly tied conceptions of femininity to

Almost everyone has some kind of leisure time whether it is a couple hours or a couple days. What varies is the type of recreational activities people choose to do during that time. Although leisure and recreation is chosen based on ones unique individual interests, there are many sociocultural factors that influence the type of recreational activities we do, when we do it and how often we do it. These factors include political,

Louise Brooks, a silent movie star, was an idol of the flappers, and their prototype for offending older generations and pushing the bounds of acceptable female behavior. She led an exuberant social life, hanging in a social circle that included George Gershwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other authors such as Benchley, Mencken, and Anita Loos. Louise Brooks epitomized the flapper culture and could be described as “flamboyant”, or “ambivalent”, yet always with an uneasy sense of pessimistic depression underneath it all.

This was also a time of optimism and desire. Money was a major foundation of society in America. Seeing as the decade was fixated on beauty, power, and wealth, people felt they could forget about their pasts and could become anyone they wanted, as though they could become an elite member of economic or social power. Flapper girls were also a new development of lifestyle during this era. Flappers were a new image for women, ditching the old and traditional lifestyle for a new, outlandish one. Being able to cut their hair short, wear short skirts, go out dancing and drinking without a man with them, and begin to speak their minds was a huge thing. From a world where the man is the one in the house that works and the woman stays home and takes care of the home and children to partying and making more carefree and promiscuous choices in their personal lives, this was a fascinating and empowering experience for some women. Though most women certainly did not adapt the extreme party lifestyle, many women at least adopted the fashion style and wore shorter skirts and got their hair cut into the bob style. For the women, being a flapper made them feel independent and powerful, and they freely practiced manipulation over rich and morally questionable men using seductive and promiscuous means. Due to the fact that so many people