What a Girl Should NOT Do

(1924 Edition)

Admonitions from one hundred years ago…

It seems every generation worries that their children are in harm’s way, and we need to protect them. I found it fascinating that even one hundred years ago, our great grandparents felt the same way.

The poster I’ve shown here includes some of the things people worried about, and although they may seem almost trivial to us now, it’s important to remember that times were very different a century ago. Sleeping until ten meant that one was lazy but could also mean that someone had been indulging in illegal alcohol. Allowing a boy to kiss one’s hand in the moonlight could lead to a girl’s reputation being ruined! It was unseemly just a decade before for a girl to use tobacco, but it was becoming common for all young people to smoke. The next item on the poster concerns the fascination with the occult, particularly with Tarot Cards and Ouija Boards. Religious institutions tried to stop this practice, but it turned out to be just a passing fad, encouraged by Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen. The final drawing of things not to do depicts a motorcar parked in a remote area. This became a cause to protect the virtue and reputations of young ladies, because “necking” never led to anything good. Somehow it remained the young ladies’ virtue they were worried about.

Whether or not a young woman such as Hazel and the generation that followed her considered themselves to be forward-thinking and modern women in the 1920s, there were always guardrails set in place by society. Bobbing one’s hair, rouging one’s cheeks, and drawing thin eyebrows after plucking one’s own were just the tip of the iceberg. When skirts began creeping up over the knees and stockings were rolled up so that garters were showing, older folks began to get worried that flappers and sheiks – their male counterparts – would be the ruin of society.

Religious institutions and schools, women’s clubs and fraternal societies all got into the business of trying to take care of what they considered to be the downfall of modern youth. They created posters and wrote articles for the newspapers, and even broadcast programming for the radio.

This was also a period of fascination with motion pictures, and young people adored emulating the stars they saw in the movie magazines and on the silver screens. Although they were still silent films, the fan magazines wrote extensive stories (often entirely untrue) of the glamorous lives of the larger-than-life actors and actresses.

By the mid-1920s, radios were becoming increasingly prevalent in homes, and popular music that was heard in films, including jazz, was heard by a wider audience. Jazz was thought by some to be a bad influence on young people because this popular genre caused them to dance in either too sultry or too frenetic a manner for the old-fashioned tastes of their parents. It was the time of the Charleston, the Black Bottom, the Foxtrot, the Lindy Hop, and the infamous Shimmy, among others. But jazz, along with ragtime, swing, and blues, were not going away, though they’d eventually include swing. With each technological advancement, there are new concerns for the safety of the latest generations of youth. Kiss your children and grandchildren whenever you can and tell them you love them. I do.