War is often a catalyst for societal change, and this was certainly true of World War I. Women had long fought for increased political rights, and the next decade saw the franchise for women expand in several countries. Women also adopted freer styles of dress and defied traditional gender roles by working outside the home and dancing and drinking in public. Likewise, the status of African Americans in the United States drew more attention as civil rights leaders emphasized the contributions of African American veterans to showcase the need for fair treatment, and writers and musicians used their work to give voice to the Black experience and to honor their heritage. Many countries embarked on efforts to incorporate more democratic principles. It was not an easy process, and many nations continued to face significant challenges in achieving their goals. The 1920s and 1930s also witnessed the growth of new forms of popular culture—the radio and movies—that appealed to the masses.

The Expansion of Democracy

When the war ended, the suffrage movement had been going on for several decades in the United States and Britain. Those who protested in support of women’s right to vote, called a suffragist, had sometimes taken radical action to highlight their cause, such as Emily Davison who threw herself in front of the King of England’s horse at a derby in 1913 and was killed. Suffragist leaders in both countries were often arrested, and many went on hunger strikes while in jail, enduring forced feedings to draw more attention to the cause.

Women’s support of the war and their physical work in war industries and the medical corps led politicians to look more favorably on the idea of women voting. Women won the right to vote in the United States in 1920, though it was couched as a reward for their war service. Britain adopted a phase-in approach. First, women over thirty who met a property qualification were given the right to vote in 1918. Then in 1928, the vote was extended to women twenty-one and older. The property qualifications for men were abolished in 1918, and all men twenty-one and older were allowed to vote. For those in the military, the age limit was lowered to nineteen.

Other countries joined the trend. German women won the right to vote in 1918. The new country of Poland extended the vote to women immediately. Other countries still imposed limitations, such as property qualifications or the need to be a war widow in order to vote. France and Italy lagged behind; women could not vote in either country until 1945.

Several minority groups in the United States hoped military service would gain them wider acceptance and rights. More than eleven thousand Native Americans served in the military during the war, and many hoped this volunteer service would provide them U.S. citizenship. Native Americans were in fact granted citizenship in 1924. Another group hoping for change were African Americans. Long subject to discriminatory laws and racial segregation, African Americans felt World War I offered them an opportunity to prove themselves loyal citizens. The United States operated a segregated military, and all-Black service member units serving overseas had a unique chance to see how other places treated them. Those in France, in particular, were struck by the freedom of movement and acceptance they found there. They were allowed in combat, while U.S. units kept them largely in support roles. There was genuine optimism that life in the United States would be different after the war.

However, after 1918, many found that little had changed. Discriminatory laws remained in place, and poor treatment even of veterans was commonplace. What was new was the prospect of mobility. In 1917, the lure of good-paying industrial jobs producing items for the war began drawing African American workers and families north. This movement continued after the war as factories began to pump out consumer products. By 1920, more than a million African Americans had left the south in a Great Migration, which continued through the next decades as well.

Racism was not absent in the North. The summer of 1919 was marked by race riots in many cities, and in the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan, a White supremacist group formed after the Civil War, spread throughout the nation. Nevertheless, northern racism seemed mild compared to what African Americans’ southern experience had been, and greater opportunities for jobs and education continued to draw people to the cities of the North and Midwest. New livelihoods and membership in civil rights groups such as the NAACP drew many into the New Negro movement in the 1920s. This drive “promoted a renewed sense of racial pride, cultural self-expression, economic independence, and progressive politics.” One of the movement’s first tasks was to agitate for a federal anti-lynching law. Lynching had become a vigilante crime whose targets were overwhelmingly African American. Anti-lynching activists knew that White men who murdered African Americans would not be punished by southern state courts. By making lynching a crime that would be tried in a federal court, however, they hoped to achieve greater justice. An anti-lynching bill came up for a vote in Congress in 1922 but was rejected, and again in 1935. White southern politicians resisted any federal intrusion, even in humanitarian causes.

 

The Harlem Renaissance, especially the works of Jamaican-born Claude McKay, in turn inspired the Négritude movement, a literary movement that emerged in French-speaking parts of Africa and the Americas. The movement was founded by Léopold Sédar Senghor, a Senegalese poet and university professor. Négritude, a term coined by Aimé Césaire, a poet and playwright from the Caribbean island of Martinique (at that time a French colony), called upon Blacks to reject European culture and values in favor of African ones.

Democratic Yearnings

The dismantling of empires at the end of the war was clearly a boon for democracy, but it was not always easy for fledgling countries to adopt new political systems. The tense situation in Ireland of the 1920s was just one example.

In 1922, the Irish Free State was created through the Anglo-Irish Treaty. This 1921 pact ended the Irish War of Independence that had begun in 1918 when the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Irish Nationalist Party fought British rule. Groups such as Sinn Féin (“We Ourselves”), organized in 1905 to fight for an independent Ireland, were often associated with the IRA and sometimes adopted more violent measures than the more moderate Irish Nationalist Party. They had the same goal but very different methods.

The Anglo-Irish Treaty initiated a vote on the future of Ireland. The six northern counties, largely Protestant, voted to remain part of the United Kingdom, but the other twenty-six formed the Irish Free State and received dominion status in the British Empire. As a dominion, the Irish Free State could make and enforce its own laws, make treaties, appoint ambassadors, and send its own representatives to international organizations. A sizable number of Catholics remained in the northern counties, however, which ultimately led to long-term violence. And while the new arrangement was a significant improvement over the past, it did not fully satisfy many Irish republicans, who wanted complete independence for Ireland. Sinn Féin itself was split; some members wanted greater sovereignty for Ireland and for the entire island to be rid of the British presence. A brief civil war broke out between the IRA and the Free State, but the Free State emerged victorious. In 1937, it was reorganized under a new government headed by Éamon de Valera, an anti-treaty leader, and took the name “Ireland.”

 

Turkey welcomed the spread of democratic institutions in the 1920s. After the triumph of his nationalist party in the early 1920s, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk established a republic with a constitution and regular elections. The Republic of Turkey disassociated itself from the old Ottoman rule by adopting many Westernized elements.

Women had the right to vote, the Arabic alphabet was no longer used, and traditional dress (veils for women and the fez for men) was outlawed. European fashion became the norm. Another major shift in Turkey was its adoption of a fully secular society. The legal system was overhauled to focus on a civil code like those of other European countries rather than on Islamic law.

Latin American countries, too, had some success expanding democracy in the 1920s. In 1910, revolution broke out in Mexico. A struggle over leadership followed in which Mexico was governed by a succession of revolutionary generals without any established way for the next president to come to power. The creation of a political party was meant to fix this, and by the 1920s, the PRI (the Institutional Revolutionary Party) had been formed. Though subject to name changes through the decades, this party dominated Mexican politics until the twenty-first century. There were regular elections and an expansion of voting, reflecting at least the outward acceptance of democratic institutions. However, the PRI effectively ran a one-party state, and all presidents and nearly all the members of the legislature were members of the party. In 1938, a new president, Lázaro Cárdenas, focused on the plight of ordinary workers in Mexico. He supported labor unions, nationalized the oil industry, promoted land reform, and attempted to bring more socialist policies to Mexico.

Other countries throughout Latin America extended voting rights in the early 1900s. Chile suffered its share of chaos as reformers tried to seize political power there. Ultimately, Chile was able to build a series of coalition governments in the 1930s that brought stability for many years. By the 1920s, political instability was increasingly common in other places like Argentina. In September 1930, General José Félix Uriburu seized power in the capital, Buenos Aires. Uriburu had been heavily influenced by the Italian version of fascism. He banned political parties and suspended the constitution. His was the first of several military coups that occurred in Argentina in the ensuing decades.

A New Culture for the Masses

Alongside the expansion of democracy, the 1920s also shepherded in a new world of mass culture and mass media. Technological innovations let people connect nearly instantaneously and have shared experiences without being in the same place. Where the infrastructure existed, it was radio and the movies that made this possible.

Radio wave technology had been pioneered in the late 1800s, but its widespread use and cultural influence were still decades off. By the 1920s, radio’s value as a news medium was becoming clear, but its true influence came from commercial radio shows, supported through another new medium called advertising that filled the airwaves in the mid-1920s. From that point through the interwar years, people could gather to hear the latest episodes of entertaining soap operas, mystery shows, and westerns, along with news items and live reporting of sports events.

Silent films had ruled movie theaters in the 1900s and 1910s, but beginning in the late 1920s, “talking pictures” emerged and quickly became the dominant form of motion pictures. Mass media technologies meant people could watch the same movies, follow the same soap operas, and cheer for the same teams despite being hundreds or thousands of miles apart. These experiences created a mass culture for the first time, uniting people whose lives had once been dominated by regional and local concerns.

The film industries in many countries developed somewhat differently in the 1930s. In the United States, the industry was centered in Hollywood, a district in Los Angeles, California. The bosses of movie studios wanted to make films that were popular with audiences and relatively cheap to produce. In other countries, the film industries were similarly popular, but many were also supportive of artistic experimentation in film. The German film industry took a modernist approach, seen in the silent 1920 horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, for example, and many of its films critiqued politics and society in the postwar era.

 

The spread of this modern image of a woman demonstrated the influence the West and especially the United States already had on popular culture. The New Woman appeared around the world on signs, in books, in song lyrics, and throughout the burgeoning movie industry. Advertisers, in particular, were quick to adopt her image, making it one to which female consumers could aspire.