New York during this time was a working class city. The women of this places acted different about their forms of leisure. The types of leisure offered were basically the same, however it was the viewpoints of the guardians who changed the outcome of them. A perfect example of this is how in New York there were hundreds of dance halls, both chaperoned and non chaperoned. Unlike New York’s dance halls, the time for dance for women in Middletown was if there was a celebration or a friend was having a chaperoned dance.
Between the 1960s and 70s, many laws were passed which allowed women to have greater freedom and more choice than they may have done in previous decades. Since the war and during the 1950s, women were treated as inferior to their husbands and were made out to be second class citizens. Their role in society was to get married, have children and stay at home and do cooking and cleaning. However, many women did not want to lead this life as they wanted more than to just be a housewife. This led to many protests and campaigns by women to allow them more rights.
They were eager for sexual experiences without having to commit to marriage believing that it takes away women’s independence. Many women were eager for sexual experiences but would keep affairs in secret from friends and family. Marriage was what legitimized a woman’s sexuality and they were to look sexually attractive and available to win husbands. As the years passed, women’s clothes started to look sexually appealing. These styles had grown popular and women who adopted these styles were called flappers.
These women were given no respect whatsoever and were constantly raped due to that. Women were seen as the most profitable because the men could use them for pleasure and the women reproduce, providing more slaves to the owner to use without having to pay for the children. During the 1920s, women were provided with more rights. They could find their own job or own a business to provide them with a living. Celie created her own business making pants after she was free from her husband and left with Shug, her very close friend that she loved, and Shug would go everywhere and sing for people in bars and clubs to provide for herself.
That is why women were a big part of the families in the projects because they found a way to survive psychically and economically. They would sell candy, take care of other tenants’ kids or even sell their body to just get some money. Although that wasn’t eve easy since they need to pay either the gang or Ms. Bailey. The gangs would tax the pimps and the prostitutes and the women selling or taking care of kids would pay Ms. Bailey. Nothing in the projects were easy for them, and they had to stick together to survive.
Sustained by the decade’s prosperity, young people threw wild parties, drank illegal liquor, and danced new, sexually suggestive steps at jazz clubs. A strong fear of death, which was something real and unpredictable, prompted attitudes of impatience and carelessness. This was true for women and men. One of the symbols of this revolution was the flapper, a term that describes a "new breed" of young Western women who flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behavior. Flappers were looked down on for wearing excessive makeup, drinking, treating sex in a casual manner, smoking, driving automobiles and otherwise flouting social and sexual norms.
The fact is that prostitutes in the Old West were good for the economy of a town and brought in money. In a wild time, these scandalous women wore makeup, and short skirts. They kept company with rough men and supported themselves the only way they knew how. Their lives were difficult, and many of them died at a young age. The life of a prostitute in the Old West was nothing like the movies.
Taking care of the home and earning an income was perceived as too much for many women. The emergence of urban civilization revolutionized this concept of women not being able to provide for themselves financially. The urban setting and economy gave women more options in comparison to agricultural regions. This was exactly the case in Philadelphia where widowhood and being a single mother was often perceived as an economic dilemma since women had to generate much more wealth in the absence of a husband. More often than not, Philadelphia women managed just fine financially.
As factory jobs were established in much of Central and South America, women were able to leave the house to work in order to earn more money to support their families. Even then as women were providing for their families, they were often seen as neglectful of their duties, and looked down upon. Latinos generally support the idea of machismo, where they value over-masculine
This freedom encouraged women to go out with their friends instead of socializing at home with the family. In order to break away from their parental authority even more, they joined the workforce. Women in the workforce began to define the new morality. Fashion was also a factor that changed during the 1920s. Women began copying the look of movie stars by shortening their hair and dressing differently.