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YOUTH CULTURE

Peer Socialization

A flamboyant youth subculture with its own ways of speaking, dressing, and acting flourished in the 1920s. Youth peer culture grew in the context of the family's retreat into a private emotional world and of the extended length of time teenagers and young adults spent in school. In the 1920s the high school, college, and peer group replaced the family's role in socializing adolescents; now these institutions defined the world of youth.

Mass Phenomenon

The new importance of schooling in creating peer culture was indicated by the marked acceleration in rates of attendance: between 1900 and 1930 highschool enrollments increased 650 percent, and attendance in colleges and universities went up threefold. Of the three decades, the 1920s witnessed the greatest rate of increase. By 1930 school attendance was a mass phenomenon for the first time: close to 60 percent of the highschool age population and almost 20 percent of those of college age enrolled in school. Thus school peer culture now reached youth from a wide range of economic classes and racial and ethnic groups, blending and homogenizing patterns of behavior and attitudes among these diverse groups.

Boy/Girl Relationships

According to Middletown, sociologists Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd's classic study of life in Muncie, Indiana, in the 1920s high school became "a place from which [youth] go home to eat and sleep." Young men and women met in classes, at evening socials, and in after-school activities. They found privacy in cars and went out with friends four or more evenings each week. Teenagers saw movies together, drove to the next town on the weekend for dances, and parked in lovers' lanes on the way home. According to the Lynds, nearly one-half of Muncie's male highschool students and one-third of its female students took part in the new practice of petting, which came into vogue because of the youths' economic independence and freedom from adult supervision. Petting parties attracted these youths, and girls who did not attend became less popular. The youth culture of the 1920s, in Muncie and beyond, provided a setting for sexual experimentation and changing moral attitudes toward sexual behavior. The new practice of dating permitted paired relationships without implying a commitment to marriage; it tested compatibility and encouraged experimental relationships with different partners. The privacy afforded by dating encouraged sexual exploration, and the practice of petting permitted a range of erotic physical contacts, while respecting the taboo against sexual intercourse.

Collegiate Style

Nowhere did the youth culture of the 1920s flourish more than on college and university campuses. Campus fads and behaviors (the emblems of group membership) symbolized youth culture and spread widely off campus. Magazines, movies, and advertising spread the word across the country about "collegiate fashions" and lifestyles, creating a mass culture and a big business. In clothing a special "flapper line" of styles and sizes was brought out, and according to a UCLA newspaper in 1923, ' "College style' has a definite meaning. To the layman it spells—debonair smartness—an individual trimness that is particularly the insignia of the young man of today. Fall '23 can almost be called the young man's season with the style pace set by the collegian." Everyone wanted to look and act "collegian," and the nation became obsessed with what glamorous college youth were doing, wearing, smoking, singing, and dancing.