Learning How to be a Modern Woman: News, Music and Magazines of the 1920s
The middle class 1920s living room served as the place where families gathered to absorb information about local and national news, fictional accounts of literary characters and editorials about how to conduct one’s self and improve his or her quality of life all in one liminal space.
News came in the form of radio sets, phonographs and forms of print media such as magazines and newspapers. Sales of radios were $60 million in 1922 and $426 million in 1929. The first commercial radio station began broadcasting in 1919, and during the 1920s, the nation’s airwaves are filled with news casts, domestic advice segments, musical variety shows and comedies. Radio drew the nation together by bringing news, entertainment, and advertisements to more than 10 million households by 1929. Phonograph production rose from 190,000 in 1923 to 5 million in 1929. Popularity of jazz, blues and “hillbilly” music fueled the phonograph boom. 88-95 percent of all Americans in the 1920s regularly read newspapers and that it became the most popular reading material in the nation at the time.
Cathedral Radio, United Radio Company, 1920s
Coined “the new hearth”, the radio served as the place where the average person received their news and entertainment. Radios served as “a gathering place for neighbors and friends who shared entertainment.”In effect, the radio is the precursor to the modern television. Radio during the resurgence of domesticity for the modern woman became more focused on domestic issues.
Hoover Model 700, mid to late 1920s, National Museum of American History
Although the electric vacuum cleaner had been invented in the early 20th century, the mass production and sales of vacuum cleaners did not take off until the economic boom that followed the decade after World War I. This Hoover vacuum model 700 was produced between 1926 and 1929 and was the first of its kind to feature an aluminum body, an on/off switch, and the agitator brushroll—an innovation that used metal beater strips to vibrate pieces of dirt from carpets.
