women of 1920s Nyc

One hundred years ago today … gender stereotypes strongly ruled public discourse around women, as evidenced by this Brooklyn Citizen clipping.

At NY1920s, we always center women’s history. For International Women’s Day–March 8th–we are looking back at the first three-plus years of our website and highlighting some of our posts about women's rights and women's lives, about women communities, and about the women who were making history in the early 1920s.

The below is just a sampling; visit our site for more stories around women New Yorkers in the 1920s, many of which are rarely told.

Just last month, we featured the first recordings of blues icon Bessie Smith. Some of the other women blues singers we have highlighted include Mamie Smith (several times), Edith Wilson, Lizzie Miles, and Ethel Waters.  Vaudeville singers Ethel Olson, Sophie Tucker, and especially Eva Tanguay are among the women who have appeared here. We have featured an all-women jazz performance from the Bronx and an all-women brass band.

Also last month, we reported on Emma Ransome women's guest house in Harlem. It built on our reports about Sojourner Truth And Katy Ferguson houses for young Black women in March of 1921.

1921 was a particularly interesting year for NYC women, and it led to our posts about an all-women platoon of traffic cops, an all-women police precinct, women staging a garment workers strike, women marching in favor of Irish independence at the Saint Patrick's Day Parade.

Birth control has been the subject of our features about the Voluntary Parenthood League and our two posts about Margaret Sanger.

Of course, voting rights arise often, such as in this post featuring an unnamed Black woman pictured voting in the Daily News, accompanied by her daughter. Political activists as famous as Helen Keller and Louise Bryant and as unknown as Rose Weiss and the Lucy Stone League show up here.

Many women writers appear on this site, including Dorothy Parker twice, Jessie Redmon Fauset repeatedly, Viña Delmar, poet Bernice Lesbia Kenyon, and poet/artist Rose O'Neill.

We report on the first Black woman principal, Gertrude Elise MacDougald, and Sarah Elizabeth Frazier, the first Black American to teach in an integrated school in New York. We have featured college women of Barnard and Adelphi, and high school girls from Erasmus. High School students  Lucille Handy at Julia Richmond School, and Yolanda Du Bois of Girls' High School, engaged in activism at their schools, we are happy to report.

This is just a sampling of what we have featured, and we look forward to offering many more posts highlighting the women of 1920s NYC.

– Jonathan Goldman, March 8, 2023

TAGS: women, gender, feminism, female