"I am separated from my husband," she began. "We have lived apart for a year, and he is not contributing to the support of our five year old son. . . I wish you would take the matter up with him."

"I'll be glad to," I said, looking at her attentively. "But tell me, Mrs. Smith, what is your real reason for coming to see me?" (103)

"Sex misunderstanding," I observed, "are the cause of most divorces and separations -- whatever may be the reasons given in public. Usually they result from ignorance, and the failure of the man and woman to understand themselves or each other." (104)

"I'm going to her right now," he cried.

"Hold hard," I said. "You'll do nothing of the kind. First you'll have a talk with the medicine man, and learn how to exorcise this demon lover, or whatever he is. And if you can't do it by the time he gets through telling you things you've never learned before, why you're less worth helping than I thought. "

"All right," he laughed. "Make an appointment for me right away." (111)

"Ignorance, second-had, traditional thinking, and our sedulous censorship on books that give any genuine information on sex, can turn the splendid possibilities of the most promising marriage into a miserable failure." (112)

Young couples who marry usually do so primarily because they love each other and want to live together and gratify their desire for each other without opposition and persecution from society, such as they would incur if they followed their natural inclinations outside of marriage. If they are really intelligent in these matters, and if they are informed, and if they know what they are about, they marry with the thought that this marriage relationship will in due time, and with the help of the sex impulse, strengthen into an intimate comradeship, at once physical and spiritual -- a comradeship which is not attainable without the tremendous emotional momentum of sex behind it -- a comradeship which is capable at its best of making a man and a woman genuinely one. Later, sex begins to fade out of the picture; it becomes less important, less central, after middle life; but by then it has done its work.

Having thus grounded their marriage on what is most true and permanent in their natures, and having likewise gotten themselves into a reasonably secure economic position, they may have children with some assurance that they are not thereby sounding the knell of their own happiness. (115)

". . . Sex is repulsive but necessary, and it's a sin to take pleasure in such a thing.--Don't you think so, Judge?" she added, with a pathetic appeal in her eyes, as if she hoped not everybody in this puzzling and unregenerate world was siding against her. "And besides, what pleasure can there be in it? People seem so -- perverted about it. It has never even tempted me," she finished, with a touch of pride.

"There is a side of sex," I answered, "with which you have evidently had no experience -- probably it is your husband's fault that you haven't. I mean the emotional side. . . " (118-119)

"Tell me, Millie," I said, switching the subject to herself. "You meant it, did you, when you said you had never had sex relations with any boy?"

She looked up frankly. "Sure I did. A lot of girls think that, and petting, are the only way to hold boys. . . . Boys are keener about what they can't have than about what they can have; and so a lot of them are keen about me. I never have any trouble with familiarities and petting and all that. Oh yes, I've been kissed. I wanted to know what it was like. It doesn't amount to anything unless you like the person you kiss, Dad says; and if it doesn't amount to anything, why do it? It's just silly and slobbery. . .

"Now some day I'm going to meet a fellow I really like -- you know what I mean. He'll be big and tall, and I'll look up to him. That's the sort I want. And when I meet him, I'll fall in love with him. And if he wants to kiss me, there'll be some thrill in that. And believe me, when I fall in love I'm not going to be stingy.

"Then, if we cared for each other enough to want to stick, we'd get married and have some babies; only he'd have to have enough money to support them. I'm crazy about babies, Judge. I'm going to have a lot of them. I suppose it will hurt, but I don't care." (127)

". . . That other girl, the pretty wild one, sat in that chair -- just the way you so."

Millie looked down carelessly. What I meant was plain to the eye; some would say shockingly plain -- but evil be to him who evil thinks. . .

Millie was plainly not disturbed by my remark. "This doesn't mean a darned thing," she said, coolly pulling her short skirt an inch higher and placidly eyeing her comely leg. "It's more comfortable and freer, that's all. Good people finally got used to them, and even took to wearing them, after they had talked themselves to death about the 'bad' people who started them. . . " (130)

From Mary Ryan, "The Projection of a New Womanhood: The Movie Moderns in the 1920s" (1982):

Although the editor cut peirodically to lustful male faces, the camera emphasized Crawford's gusto and liveliness, rather than eroticism. When the dancing Crawford ripped off her skirt, it was as if to remove a constricting garment, to facilitate freedom of movement and release of energy, not to entice male admirers. Her Charleston consisted not of bumps and grinds, but of jumps and starts at a frantic pace. Her sheer vitality and self-confidence were at the forefront. In the role of "Dangerous Diana" Crawford upheld the new standard of movie virtue. In contrast, it was the "evil women" of Our Dancing Daughters who portrayed shy innocence, a mere ruse to captivate an old-fashioned hero. (504)

Yet the stars' vitality only embellished a rigidifying set of movie stereotypes; the twenties' films gave precise details on how to become correctly modern. (504)

These cinematic personalities are more than an historical depository of female images. In the twenties they served as a means of propagating new values and translating popular images into social behavior. As a consequence the movie moderns claim a part in the making of modern womanhood with all the sex roles and sexual stereotyping it entailed. Their initial function was simply didactic and instructional, to train the female audience in fashionable femininity. The movies of the slient era were inherently stereotypical, relying on extravagant images, bold-faced titles and enthralling musical accompaniment. (505)

Studies of female movie-goers, financed by the Payne Fund and conducted between 1929 and 1933 revealed that young women paid close attention to the star's appearance and behavior. Of a Joan Crawford film, one girl said, "I watch every detail, of how she's dressed, and her make-up, and also her hair." (506)

The movie heroine was always chaste at heart. Whatever extremes of brash free-living Bow or Crawford might protray, they preserved their virginity until marriage. . . Sex in the films of the twenties existed as a readiness to display physical attractions, not as a willingness to give in to the yearnings of the flesh; it heightened sexual awareness without promising sexual gratification. (507)

Sexiness was in fact associated more with apparel, make-up, and perfume than with the body itself. While movie morality kept sexuality within traditional bounds, materialistic desires were given bountiful gratification in the cinema of the twenties. Hollywood fed consumer lusts through its stock production values. . . . (507)

The historians' task . . . is to identify the predicaments which underlie the popular film, to analyze the condition from which the viewer is "being vicariously relieved." (508)

The magic of these movies, and their meaning to the historian, lie as much in the anxieties which precede the domestic denouement as in the happy ending itself. Movie fantasies have a double-edged quality, are both "dreams and nightmares" as Raymond Dugnat puts it. At times the nightmares constitute the direct and central themes of the movies; more often, particularly in women's films, fearful visions provide the cutting edge of the romance itself. Imbedded in the images and plots of the movie moderns are a prevalent set of tensions, unfulfilled promises, and unhappy endings for minor characters. These tragic subplots provided the essential dramatic tension in the films of the twenties. Many women lost out in the marriage competition, and not even the most optimistic melodrama tied up every female character in a neat wedding knot. (512)

The most heart-felt sympathy between women . . . arose to salve the wounds inflicted by males. Female friendship appeared as a supportive by-product of heterosexual relations, not as a primary female bond. (514)

The melodrama's happy ending could not entirely efface all these peripheral failures and inherent contradictions. (514)

Images:

John Held, Jr., "Mobile Sheiks and Shebas," or, "The Jazz Age" (1925)

The next image is John Held, Jr., "She Left Home Under a Cloud" (1920s):