ALANNAH WILLIAMS
1920
V
Nowadays, you wouldn’t see people walking around with fake jewellery dangling from their wrists and neck, and wearing bow ties to every casual occasion. And if somebody proposed that you spend the next three hours playing Tiddledy Winks, they would probably earn some very confused glances in their direction. But this is exactly what people did in the 1920s. If we teleported back 100 years to a world of radio broadcasts and jitterbug dancing, pulling out your mobile phone and setting it to make strange noises could get you arrested. And if you started complaining about taking the night shift at your work, people would accuse you of breaking the law! Some things over the years have stayed the same; men are still paid more than women in most sports, winter is the still coldest month and ice cream is still awesome, but many things have undergone very obvious changes. Ways of accessing music, television, and radio all differ drastically One of the most obvious differences between their world and ours was the standard of gender equality. Back then the world was a very different place for women. In 1920 all women except Aboriginal women were given the right to vote, meaning they had a greater say in how the country was run. This was really significant, because it meant that men were acknowledging women as having opinions and values of their own. Can you imagine what it would be like to have spent years being, ‘owned’ by your husband, father, or brother? Even those who did acknowledge that women were people in their own right, believed that they should succumb to the will of the dominant male, so it was seen as pointless to allow women to vote in the first place. In 1921 the University of Carolina accepted and promoted female students and graduates, but there were still restrictions as to what jobs women could be accepted into, and the shifts they could work. It was, for example, illegal for women to work at night, because it would interfere with their running of the household. What was more, women who worked in science and maths were few and far between, and if they entered a male-dominated workplace they tended to be ostracised. In 2020, it has been scientifically proven that while girls learn better in schools with only other girls, boys learn better in co-ed schools.
022
features and human interests
