The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920's

US social history. American youth in the 1920s.

It is an interesting microcosm social history, but I hoped it would reflect much larger American politics and social phenomena. Just read the conclusion if you don't have time -- it's a good summary.

I'll say first of all that this IS an interesting book. But seriously... it's too long!
Many parts of the book are full of repetitions, concepts repeated over and over again, unnecessarily, so much so that many times I came to the point of thinking: "I don't believe it. She's really saying it AGAIN," and was tempted to just skip the part. I never actually did it, but still...

The first part was the more interesting for me. Well, I suppose that people who read about social history of family will know everything in here, but because I've never read about the subject, everything was new to me. Here's where the change in the relation between men and women is addressed quite in detail, a change that went on for nearly one century before coming to the revolution of the Twenties. The author explains the way and the reasons why a change inside the couple was possible and desirable at this time in history, and why in the Twenties relationships became more companionable, more intimate, more based on trust and sharing. Why and how this affected the way parents treated children, an so why in the Twenties young people had so much freedom in comparison with all the generations that came before.
There are quite e few repetition here too, but because I was so engaged in the subject matter, I didn't really mind.

The part about the discussion that went on in the Twenties about young in general and young women in particular, though interesting, was a bit too abstract in my opinion and went on too much.
Bu the real trial for me was the middle part.
Here the author addresses campus life. Really, I nearly couldn't stand it. She repeats the same three or four concepts over and over and over and over again, so that it might have been interesting the first time, but because of the obsessive repetition I just couldn't stand it. And honestly, from what I read, I don't think campus life was so interesting to devote so much time and words to it.

The last part is what I expected the book to talk about before I read it: actual behaviour of young people in the Twenties and why they acted like that. Why young women started bobbing their hair, why they started shedding layers and layers of dressing, why they started using cosmetics. How young men reacted. What young people considered inappropriate as opposed to what they parents considered inappropriate.
I really enjoyed this part. Shame that it was so short.

So on the whole I would recommend the book to anyone interested in social history, especially of the Twenties. Just keep a good stock of patience at hand... or prepare yourself to skipping quite a few pages.

I've used this book more than probably any other in my scholarly career. For the bibliography alone it's worth owning. The analyses are written in a sorta dated style at this point, 30 years after the book's original publication. Still, the trends Fass highlights offer a great paradigm for reading youth fiction of the 20s---and I don't mean just Fitzgerald. It's equally applicable to harder-to-find stuff, from FLAMING YOUTH and THE PLASTIC AGE to period campus novels and even Bodenheim's REPLENISHING JESSICA.

A real mixed bag. As a look at collegiate life in the 1920s, it's often informative (though that's less range than I expected), but it's very dry and relies on surveys, newspaper articles and books of the era than say, memoirs or personal reminiscences. This makes it very abstract, more like a book about the forces shaping youth (peer pressure, for instance) than real people.
A minor problem is that in portraying the era as sexually liberated compared to the past, Fass parrots every inaccurate cliche about how Victorians believed no virtuous woman enjoyed sex (it's minor because it doesn't really affect the main thesis).

A well-researched academic work about the youth culture of the 1920s, and the first published book by social and cultural historian Paula Fass. The title is a play on the similar title of a 1922 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fass's book is divided into two parts. In the first part, she provides background on the social changes taking place in America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how these changed family structure and function. She argues that increased industrialization and urbanization transformed the family from a hierarchical unit based on bonds of mutual responsibility, with the function of production in the economy, to an egalitarian unit based on bonds of mutual affection, with the function of consumption in the economy. This marks the transition from the old "Victorian" morality of the traditionalists to the new modern morality of the progressives. It is usual for historians to identify a major cultural shift around this time, with the First World War typically given as the demarcation point. Per Fass, the changes in familial relationships, along with ending child labor and increasing childhood education, led to the evolution of a youth "peer society," from which young Americans took cues as to proper conduct in a rapidly evolving culture.

In the second part of the book, Fass describes this "youth culture" and its attitudes towards education, leisure time, fashion, sexual morality, drinking (during Prohibition, no less) and trends such as cigarette smoking by women and, of course, dancing to jazz music. The subjects of Fass's work are specifically college students in the 1920s, which in a sense limits the study to the experience of a subset of American youth, but also captures the social effects of rising rates of participation in higher education by the middle class. These students would have been somewhere on the cusp between the Lost Generation and the Greatest Generation, and it's not a stretch to say that the habits which they developed became the established mode of collegiate life with which everyone who grew up in America in the twentieth century would be familiar, including its emphasis on athletics and fraternity/sorority life, its dating rituals, its casual alcoholism, and its boosterist school spirit. The college youth of the 1920s were mostly concerned with socializing and with preparing for a life in the business world, and less so with actual academics. They were living in the Coolidge era, after all. I was reminded of my own experience of college in the 1980s, and imagine I might have felt as out place as a "grind" or a "drip" in the 1920s as I did as a "nerd" in the 1980s. But to be fair to these "flaming youth," as a contemporary might have described them, they were not out of control, "burning their candle at both ends" as a previous generation had done, but instead establishing norms of propriety in a new cultural context, one that has stuck with us to this day.

This book is a heavy read, as it is written in thick, academic prose. Sometimes it seems the author repeats the same point over and over just to fill out her chapters. But she does provide statistical data, and ample end notes with references. A bibliography would have been nice, as well, but there is none so you have to search the notes for the first reference to any work to get the full biblio entry. There's a lot of insight and information in this book, but warning to the reader: it is not for the faint-hearted.

Helpful for understanding the rise and development of youth culture.

I'm a huge 20s nut and have spent the last couple of years reading as much fact and fiction about the era as possible. One of my favourites is DJ Taylor's excellent Bright Young People, and I picked this up thinking it would be similar, but covering US versions of events.

As it happens, I should probably have read the reviews more carefully as this book is definitely more a text book than historical biography. Still, that didn't put me off as I've read plenty of other similar books and like reading meatier studies sometimes.

I learnt a lot from this book, but it was definitely a slog. I found it pretty hard-going at times and had to break to read a couple of lighter fiction books at times. This isn't a criticism of the book - it does exactly what a study book should, it's just not necessarily right for reading in the garden in the sun or on an early morning commute!

A very interesting read, which I imagine would be essential for any history/sociology student interested in the 20s.