The 20s is a time that represented freedom but at the same time repression and oppression. It was a time when rich people partied their hardest like seen in Gatsby, women gained the right to vote, and gained more freedom with the way they dressed. At the same time Gatsby was partying in his glorious mansion down South, black people were getting beat up for just attempting to vote. In the United States, Flappers were putting on their ankle-high skirts to get ready to go out for a night of fun while in Europe people were starving in the ruins of WWI. When Al Capone was getting rich selling alcohol illegally, the native populations of Africa and the Middle East were being oppressed by their colonial occupiers. While Lithuanians, Poles, Latvians, Finns, Estonians, and Slavs gained independence that was at the cost of many Jewish lives and rights in these newly formed nations.
Flappers are the people who I really associate with the 1920s because my great-grandmother was a flapper. So really I guess I think of my great-grandmother when I think of the 20s. My grandma would always tell me how her mother was a flapper and how she lived a very illustrious life as a flapper. I have tons of pictures of her in her ankle-high skirts, her coats, and big hats with her friends. She told me she went to tons of dances and many different boyfriends when she lived the life of a flapper. There’s also pictures of her in bathing suits and there’s even one picture in a tennis outfit with a very short skirt. I think of how she went to the Catskills every Summer with her friends and she would dress in knickers while playing all kinds of sports at these getaways in the Catskills. I also think of shorthand as my great-grandmother was a master shorthand and made her money as a secretary writing conversations down extremely fast in shorthand.
The images I saw when I googled the 1920s mostly confirmed what I already thought about it. Most of the images actually showed flappers surprisingly. 8 out of the 10 first images included flappers while the other images were protests on prohibition. I guess I don’t really think about protests against prohibition and I only think of the religious Christians who protested for prohibition when the amendment was originally ratified. Two of the images were captioned the roaring 20s in Britain and I never really thought the 20s were as roaring in Britain as they were in America. I thought the roaring 20s were a mainly American thing and everywhere else experienced the decade very differently. There are also images of Gatsby and partying which I already knew about.
Something that is obviously missing from these images are images depicting the repression and oppression of people that I also talked about in my impression of the 1920s. All of the pictures of the 1920s are from the US or Britain and are about the roaring twenties and not the other side of it. I had to scroll through a lot of photos till I finally found a photo of a book about the KKK in the 1920s and the crash of 1929. Then about 5 rows under that was finally an actual picture of a KKK gathering. There was an image of Halloween in the 1920s before I could find an image about the KKK in the 1920s. There didn’t seem to be any photos that depicted anything outside America or Britain either.
