The 1920s saw the rise of a global discourse about ‘the modern girl’, whose fashions, hairstyles, and behaviors shaped, and were shaped by, changing social and sexual mores. Young working- and lower-middle-class women were the primary market for the romance weeklies of this era, which have been discounted by critics as little more than escapist fantasies. Although the majority of these magazines or ‘pulps’ focused on fashion, glamour, and romance at the expense of explicitly political discourses around suffrage, work, and family, in their pages the figure of the modern girl came to stand in for changing perceptions of women’s cultural roles – particularly in the transformations wrought by modern consumption and leisure practices, such as the burgeoning fan culture around silent cinema. The romance weeklies offered the opportunity for readers to work through both the dangers and the possibilities of social and sexual agency for young women in the 1920s.
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I would argue that the romance weeklies of the 1920s offered a unique combination of fictions that both departed from and reflected the experiences of the modern girl, and that their appeal lay in precisely this intermingling of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Fictions featuring modern girls whose lives were transformed by their roles as amateur detectives, film stars, and romantic heroines, were complemented by columns urging women to adopt the hairstyles and fashions of the actresses they saw on stage and screen. In some cases the fictions operated in tension with the columns: several of the papers approached their fictions as cautionary tales warning young women of the struggles faced by aspiring actresses, as if to modulate their desires to become the glamorous celebrities they read about in the gossip pages. These stories used the tradition of nineteenth-century literary melodrama to offer guidance to young women on the dangers of urban life and leisure; they reveal a fictional context in which class exploitation and sexual violence were juxtaposed against conversations about female agency in the 1920s. This was most true in the case of stories with theatrical settings; while the theatre could not cast off its Victorian associations of sexual immorality and vice, the cinema, as a site of modernity, was invested with a greater sense of social mobility and agency for young women. However, even in the cautionary tales of women’s victimisation at the hands of men, the modern young female protagonists of these stories triumph over oppressive social conditions such as economic privation and sexual harassment, navigating a culture of ‘parasexual’ glamour – in Peter Bailey’s terms, ‘a new form of open yet licit sexuality’ – associated with the display industries of stage and screen (Bailey 1990: 13). Rather than functioning as escapist fantasies or emblems of false consciousness, the romance weeklies offered the opportunity for readers to work through both the dangers and the possibilities of social and sexual agency for young women in the 1920s. (88)
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