5. According to Frederick Lewis Allen, how did middle-class women's lives change in the 1920s?
5. According to Frederick Lewis Allen, how did middle-class women's lives change in the 1920s?
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![Document 3: Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s, 1931
...And what were these "new middle class women" to be like? Well, for one thing, they could take jobs. Up to this
time girls of the middle classes who had wanted to "do something" had been largely restricted to school-teaching,
social-service work, nursing, stenographic, and clerical work in business houses. But now they poured out of the
schools and colleges into all manner of new occupations. They took over the offices of publishers and advertisers;
they went into management, they sold antiques, sold real estate, opened smart little shops, and finally invaded the
department stores. In 1920, small-town girls who once would have been contented to stay in Sauk Center
[Minnesota] all their days were now borrowing from father to go to New York or Chicago to seek their fortunes -
in Best's or Macy's or Marshall Field's...No topic was so furiously discussed at luncheon tables from one end of
the country to the other as the question whether the married woman should take a job, and whether the mother had
a right to. And as for the unmarried woman, she no longer had to explain why she worked in a shop or an office; it
was idleness, nowadays, that had to be defended....
5. According to Frederick Lewis Allen, how did middle-class women's lives change in the 1920s?](/v2/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcontent.bartleby.com%2Fqna-images%2Fquestion%2F8999b383-40af-48a7-a8a0-51ab94b4d826%2F59b2498a-b484-4b98-a49b-6766fcfdb065%2F3do5rx_processed.jpeg&w=3840&q=75)
Transcribed Image Text:Document 3: Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s, 1931
...And what were these "new middle class women" to be like? Well, for one thing, they could take jobs. Up to this
time girls of the middle classes who had wanted to "do something" had been largely restricted to school-teaching,
social-service work, nursing, stenographic, and clerical work in business houses. But now they poured out of the
schools and colleges into all manner of new occupations. They took over the offices of publishers and advertisers;
they went into management, they sold antiques, sold real estate, opened smart little shops, and finally invaded the
department stores. In 1920, small-town girls who once would have been contented to stay in Sauk Center
[Minnesota] all their days were now borrowing from father to go to New York or Chicago to seek their fortunes -
in Best's or Macy's or Marshall Field's...No topic was so furiously discussed at luncheon tables from one end of
the country to the other as the question whether the married woman should take a job, and whether the mother had
a right to. And as for the unmarried woman, she no longer had to explain why she worked in a shop or an office; it
was idleness, nowadays, that had to be defended....
5. According to Frederick Lewis Allen, how did middle-class women's lives change in the 1920s?
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Historian Frederick Lewis Allen described how the lives of middle-class women in the United States changed during the 1920s in his book "Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s."
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