The Modernist Social and Cultural Revolution

I.  The Changing Lives of Women
II. Popular Culture in the Twenties and Thirties
III. A Modernist Dystopia: Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1927)

Women and social change in the interwar period
1. changing political and legal rights
2. changes in women’s paid work
3. “the new woman”
4. maternalism and pronatalism
5. feminist responses and debates

1. Lady Astor (first woman to take a seat as a Member of Parliament in GB)
access to university education: emergence of a generation of university-educated women and intellectuals
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929)

2. changes in women’s paid work outside the household
i. wartime move into industrial positions reversed after the war
ii. but this doesn’t mean: status quo
iii. proportion of women paid for work doesn’t change (1/3)
iv. what changes is where they work: a range of “modern” occupations in newer sectors of the economy (e.g offices)
v. one result: anxieties about women and modernity get fused
vi. Q: was this “emancipation?” not necessarily:
•underpaid occupations, earnings supplement household income
•“double burden”
•a concern addressed by socialist feminists (already before 1914)

3. "new woman" | realities and cultural mythologies
hopes and fears about changes in gender
hopes and fears about broader social change ("modernity")
images of Maria in Fritz Lang, "Metropolis" (1927): the good Maria vs. the bad, robot "Maria" (sexual and political danger)

4. maternalism:  policies to support childbearing and motherhood
pronatalism:  policies to to support population growth
Eleanor Rathbone / maternalist feminism
"gendered citizenship" emerging: men as heads of households and breadwinners; women as mothers, via household and reproduction

5. One perspective on women, feminism, and state policy:
True equality meant freeing [mothers] from economic dependence on their husbands by granting equal honour and financial support to their work in the “women’s sphere.” This could not be done through “old feminist” campaigns for equal pay and open access to men’s jobs…Only state intervention could do so; welfare programs could circumvent the labour market to provide independent support for mothers.
--Eleanor Rathbone

Five features of the new popular culture:
1. new media: radio, movies
2. consumer society
3. organized leisure
4. debates about modernist design: the Bauhaus
5. “Americanization”: Taylorism, Fordism

Nazi leisure organization:  "Strength Through Joy" (Kraft durch Freude (KdF))
radio = Volksempfänger (Volks-receiver)
Volkswagen = Volks-car (originally, KdF-Wagen)
Autobahn
Bauhaus / Walter Gropius
Marcel Breuer / Breuer chair
Le Corbusier:  the house as a "machine for living"
functionalism
Nazis' "degenerate art" exhibition (Munich, 1937)

A breach has been made with the past, which allows us to envisage a new aspect of architecture corresponding to the technical civilization of the age we live in…
Rationalization, which many people imagine to be [the new architecture’s] cardinal principal, is really only its purifying agency. The liberation of architecture from a welter of ornament, the emphasis on its structural functions, and the concentration on concise and economical solutions…represent the purely material side…The other [side], the aesthetic satisfaction of the human soul, is just as important as the material.
Walter Gropius, "The New Architecture and The Bauhaus"

"Americanization" as a way of thinking about changes associated with modernization
Frederick Winslow Taylor:  scientific management / efficiency / time and motion studies
Henry Ford / "Fordism"