TY - BOOK AU - Søland,Birgitte TI - Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s SN - 9781400839278 AV - HQ1672 PY - 2022///] CY - Princeton, NJ : PB - Princeton University Press, KW - Feminism KW - Denmark KW - History KW - 20th century KW - Sex role KW - Women KW - SOCIAL SCIENCE / Women's Studies KW - bisacsh KW - Appelgaard, Magda KW - Asby, Elna KW - Bang-Pedersen, Mathilde KW - Bentzen, Viggo KW - Brooks, Louise KW - Bønnelycke, Emil KW - Christensen, Amanda KW - Ege, Louise KW - Enevold, Lily KW - Eriksen, Anna KW - Ingvardsen, Dora KW - Jensen, Edith KW - Jensen, Margrethe KW - Johansen, Emilie KW - Kristensen, Ingrid KW - Kruse, Vinding KW - Langelinie Affair KW - Lundgaard, Agnes KW - Mangart, Inger KW - Nedergaard, Henny KW - Nielsen, Netta KW - Nordic Commission on Family Law KW - Nybrandt, Gerda KW - Okkels, Jenny KW - Petersen, Stine KW - Pickford, Mary KW - Rerup, Ingeborg KW - Reumert, Ellen KW - Sommersted, Hedvig KW - Sorensen, Nikoline KW - Stopes, Marie KW - Suhr, Inga KW - Swanson, Gloria KW - Viby, Marguerite KW - Warming, Jens KW - advice columns KW - birth control KW - chivalry KW - consumer culture KW - courtship KW - dancing KW - divorce: popular perceptions of KW - female friendships KW - feminism KW - gender antagonism KW - hairdressers KW - marriage reform legislation KW - mother-daughter relationships KW - personal narratives KW - public entertainment KW - wedding vows N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Acknowledgments --; INTRODUCTION --; PART I From Victorian Ladies to Modern Girls: The Construction of a New Style of Femininity --; CHAPTER 1 The Emergence of the Modern Look --; CHAPTER 2 Fit for Modernity --; PART II The Hew Eve and the Old Adam? The Creation of Modern Gender Relations --; CHAPTER 3 Good Girls and Bad Girls --; CHAPTER 4 Beauties and Boyfriends, Bitches and Brutes --; PART III "A Great Mew Task": The Modernization of Marriage and Domestic Life --; CHAPTER 5 From Pragmatic Unions to Romantic Partnerships? --; CHAPTER 6 "A Most Important Profession" --; CONCLUSION --; Notes --; Select Bibliography --; Index; restricted access N2 - In the decade following World War I, nineteenth-century womanhood came under attack not only from feminists but also from innumerable "ordinary" young women determined to create "modern" lives for themselves. These young women cut their hair, wore short skirts, worked for wages, sought entertainment outside the home, and developed new attitudes toward domesticity, sexuality, and their bodies. Historians have generally located the origins of this shift in women's lives in the upheavals of World War I. Birgitte Søland's exquisite social and cultural history suggests, however, that they are to be found not in the war itself, but in much broader social and economic changes.Søland's engrossing chronicle draws on a rich variety of sources--including popular media and medical works as well as archival records and oral histories--to examine how notions of femininity and womanhood were reshaped in Denmark, a small, largely agrarian country that remained neutral during the war. It explores changes in the female body and personality, the forays of young women into the public sphere, the redefinition of female respectability, and new understandings of married life as evidenced in both cultural discourses and social practices. Though specific in its focus, the book raises broad comparative questions as it challenges common assumptions about the social and sexual upheavals that characterized the Western world in the postwar decade. In a remarkably engaging fashion, it shows why the end of World War I did not lead to the return of "normal" life in the 1920s UR - https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400839278?locatt=mode:legacy UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781400839278 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9781400839278/original ER -