Girl Sleuth (12 page)

At last Mildred had an outlet for all of her athletic talent and ability. She was unstoppable, and even at a school known for its strong athletics, she made an impression quickly. “
AUGUSTINE WON NOVICE SWIMMING MEET LAST NIGHT
,” ran one headline in the
Daily Iowan
her sophomore year. The story underneath it announced that she had beat out thirty other girls for the honor.
Women's athletics, especially swimming, were a new and thrilling part of campus life, and the life of the nation as well. Swimsuits themselves were the fashion accessory of the moment, perfect for baring the boyish figure that was all the rage, while the caps that went with them complemented the new bobbed hairstyle very pleasingly. In 1926 nineteen-year-old Olympic champion Gertrude Ederle became one of the country's biggest celebrities when she not only became the first woman to swim the treacherous twenty-one miles of the English Channel, but did it faster than the five men who had done it before her. Americans had never seen such speed and daring from their girls.

The University of Iowa, started in 1855, moved to the former capitol building in Iowa City in 1857 (the state capital itself was moved to Des Moines that year) and was the perfect place for a girl with aspirations both professional and athletic. Founded at federal expense and situated on land ceded by a federal grant, it was big and rowdy and had, among other things, a long-standing reputation for progressiveness and equality. It had admitted men and women on an equal basis since the moment it began holding classes, the first public institution in the United States to do so. In addition, there were no restrictions on students of any race or ethnicity. By 1922, Mildred's freshman year, the university was well established. “The institution of the present more than justifies the hopes of its founders,” said the president. In addition to the undergraduate liberal arts program, Iowa had a law school, a medical school, a dental school, an engineering school, a school of pharmacy, a school of education, and schools of public health, nursing, “commerce,” and music. It was truly engaged in preparing its students for fulfilling, necessary places in the world. As for the energetic student body, its nearly six thousand members were experiencing a kind of idealism and freedom that to previous generations would have been unthinkable. The difficult war years were finally over, and everyone, it seemed, was ready to let loose.

For the young men and women of Mildred's generation, as for everyone, the Great War had been a bloody education in the unthinkable cruelty of humankind and the new powers available to the military world. The first massive bombing of civilians and the first use of chemical weapons like poison chlorine gas had left little doubt in anyone's mind that the world had entered a terrifying new era. Though the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in the summer of 1914 actually set off the war in Europe, for most Americans it was the infamous sinking of the
Lusitania
by a German U-boat in the spring of 1915 that brought home the dangers of the western front. Americans were outraged, and though Wilson was reelected the following year on an antiwar platform (“He kept us out of the war”), he asked for permission to declare war on Germany in the spring of 1917, telling his fellow countrymen: “The world must be made safe for democracy.” The first wave of American troops landed on French soil in 1917.

“Good-bye Broadway, Hello France, we're ten million strong,” ran the lyrics of one popular song that year. “Good-bye sweethearts, wives and mothers, it won't take us long.” Never before had America sent her troops to another land to fight for freedom, and the patriotic fervor it created ran high as the news from across the ocean grew more and more worrying. Service flags with blue stars for each family member serving and gold ones for those who had been killed hung in windows and over porches of homes across the country. Food was rationed (“Eat More Cottage Cheese, You'll Need Less Meat,” suggested one propaganda poster put out by the Board of Food Administration), and prescribed heatless, wheatless, and sugarless days, along with drives to save scrap metal and buy war stamps and war bonds, became a feature of everyday life. “Uncle Sam needs that extra shovelful of coal!” the iconic red, white, and blue character cheerfully reminded.

In November of 1918 Germany surrendered at last and signed Wilson's armistice agreement. Though American soldiers fought only the tail end of the war, the boost of morale created by both the country's entry into the conflict and Wilson's role in bringing it to a close allowed America to emerge as a global power, ushering in a new sense of pride and well-being that colored the postwar years, even as the country retreated back into isolationism. “Above all in the 1920s,” historian Sarah Jane Deutsch writes, “there was a pervasive sense of newness. To many it seemed that the world was made new after the massive destruction of World War I ended in 1918—and that women were made new too.”

Though it would not be until the Second World War that the image of the working woman on the home front was popularized, the spike in employment women experienced during the Great War had similarly transformative effects. They had gone over to Europe in droves as nurses and Red Cross aid workers in the early years of the fighting, well before the United States had committed any troops. It was, for many of them, the opportunity of a lifetime, as the situation abroad was so chaotic that “women who were daring and willing could easily assign themselves to duty.” There were many such women to be found in America, all of them longing for something to do. After 1917 the ones who did not want to go abroad began to fill in for the missing men at their places of employment, often in iron factories and steel mills that were producing materials for the war effort. At one point during the fighting, women made up 20 percent or more of workers “manufacturing airplanes, electrical machinery, leather and rubber goods, food, and printed materials,” and by the end of the war,
more than one hundred thousand women worked for the railroad as everything from station clerks to dispatchers to rail-yard laborers. Their earnings were often two to three times greater than what they had made before the war, if they had made anything at all. When the fighting ended, they were understandably reluctant to give up these jobs, a turn of events that angered and worried the men they had replaced. In New York, where many women were employed in public transportation, the Amalgamated Association of Street and Electric Railway Employees wrote a little ditty to express their dismay: “We wonder where we are drifting, where is the freedom of the stripes and stars / If for the sake of greed and profit we put women conductors on the cars.” Having come too far to be so easily dismissed, the women responded in kind: “The simple, tender, clinging vine / That once around the oak did twine / Is something of the past; / We stand now by your side / And surmount obstacles with pride, / We're equal free at last / And I would rather polish steel, / Than get you up a tasty meal.”

The other great change that affected women in the post–World War I years was the advent of widely available birth control, thanks to a powerful movement spearheaded by Margaret Sanger. Any form of contraception—even literature about it, which fell under the obscenity laws even for married women—had remained illegal well into the early part of the century. Educated women had access to condoms and spermicide, which were often obtained from Europe, but for the masses, no such materials were available. The only options were unlikely abstinence, backstreet abortions, and, presumably, the less-than-effective rhythm method. Sanger's own mother, an Irish working-class woman, had gone through eighteen pregnancies and eleven live births, giving her daughter an unforgettable reason to fight for change. In 1916, after spending a few years in Europe after an arrest, Sanger returned to the United States and, with her sister, set up an experimental birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York. She was promptly arrested yet again, which drew enormous attention to her cause. Women of all classes and education levels banded together to support her efforts, protesting and going to prison for handing out illegal pamphlets, and each time another group was arrested, the groundswell of support for legalized birth control grew. By the 1920s birth control leagues were ministering to women both nationally and internationally and fighting for the legalization of their services, a cause that had long since taken on a political aspect along with its medical one as women emerged from World War I with a clearer sense of their rights than ever before.

With a dramatically different idea about what might be possible in their futures, women enrolled in college in the highest numbers ever in the 1920s. This group of coeds, as they were known, was a jubilant bunch. Having gained the vote at last in 1920—what was the point of fighting for democracy elsewhere when they did not have it at home, they had demanded to know—they turned their backs on the previous generation's activism and began to sunbathe, wear makeup, and dress in short skirts. They seemed, in fact, to take their new privilege for granted. As Mildred herself put it, “I always voted and I just accepted that it is a woman's right, but I never became involved in suffrage at all. I just took it as it came . . . I just assumed that we would get it, which we did.” All of this presumptuousness was distressing to the leaders of the recently victorious suffrage movement. Watching America's young women take their freedom and run with it was too much for the older generation. As flappers descended upon the country with their spangles and cigarettes, they seemed to wipe out all of the struggles and high-minded activism that had brought them into being, leaving only the fizz of champagne and racy stories in their wakes. Heralding a swing of the pendulum, by 1924, as one historian notes, “popular magazines were running articles (written by men) with such titles as ‘Is Woman Suffrage A Failure?' and ‘Women's Ineffective Use of the Vote.'”

But the young women of the early twenties were not all just about razzle-dazzle. On the Iowa campus, the Women's Association was a powerful presence that threw parties for undergraduate women and made sure they were properly represented in extracurricular activities. The Women's Athletic Association was also strong, and there were numerous clubs for women only, including sororities and literary societies. Living conditions, too, were up-to-the-minute. Many women, including Mildred in her first year, were housed in the modern new Currier Hall, which had private bathrooms and telephones in every room and kitchenettes for students who got the midnight munchies after dining-room hours. It was a building of such opulence and calm that one alumna, upon entering it for the first time, felt that any girl living there would realize “that these college years mean her chance to do something, to be somebody; that these four springtimes at the big dormitory may be her planting and her sowing season for a lifetime of high efficiency and lasting happiness.” And though the Currier Hall rules about table manners and attire were strict, they could not prevent the falling away of many old social codes. “Today's woman gets what she wants,” ran one newspaper ad of the era. “The vote. Slim sheaths of silk to replace voluminous petticoats . . . The right to a career.” Even a man as traditional as Edward Stratemeyer could see the change: “I see in your books you have a tendency to fearful and fainting girls and women,” he chided one of his male girls' series writers. “Better cut it—in these days the girls and women have about as much nerve as the boys and men. The timid, weeping girl must be a thing of the past.”

Dating—no chaperone necessary—was all the rage, and skirts went as far up as the knee. (Mildred confessed to wearing “short” skirts, but not “short short” ones.) Women cut their hair up to their ears and wore open collars, and corsets were a thing of the past. Perhaps all of this was what brought the president of Mount Holyoke College, Mary Woolley, to the Iowa campus to answer charges that young people, meaning young women, were more superficial than they had been twenty years earlier. They were considered “flighty and flippant” in some circles, but Woolley was careful to draw the distinction between those girls and the ones who wanted more out of life. “There are certain qualities which characterize the woman of today, qualities which her mother and grandmother did not have, and these are independence and initiative,” she told an enthralled crowd. “These qualities can be over-emphasized but I do not believe that this is the case today. The average girl has not developed them to such an extent that she is unruly, but they have helped her to gain a confidence which the older generation of women did not possess and a poise which makes her feel perfectly at home in any society and enables her to rise to any emergency.” This was the ethos of the new generation. Along with the enormous barriers that had spawned it, the collectivist impulse that had allowed women to conquer so much in the past was fading. Now, it seemed, it was each woman for herself. When the Equal Rights Amendment was introduced in Congress in 1923, instead of sparking a whole new women's movement, it simply died on the vine. The National Woman's Party, which had thirty-five thousand members in 1920, had been reduced to a mere one thousand by the end of the decade. These new pioneers believed that in order to succeed, they needed to move beyond the idea of themselves as a separate entity from men; what they wanted was simple equality. In a
Harper's Magazine
article called “Feminist—New Style,” the female author commented on the current generation's regard for those who came before: “They fought her battle, but she does not want to wear their mantle.”

This description certainly applied to Mildred, who, utterly of her time, remembered herself in college as “an impudent little pup” and an “individualist.” It was the perfect moment for such a girl to enter college. The war years had changed the face of leadership at Iowa from masculine to feminine, just as it had changed the country's. In the absence of male students, women had taken many positions of power in student government and extracurricular activities that, like the women of the New York City public transit system, they were not about to give back for no good reason. The student newspaper had had its first female editor—in fact, the first female editor of any campus daily newspaper—in 1918. This in turn led to the founding of a chapter of the national journalism sorority, Theta Sigma Phi, which Mildred would join in her years at Iowa.