Power and Sexuality: The Portrayal of 1920s Women

            In The Big Money, by John Dos Passos, Margo Dowling seduces a young guitar player to run away from home, flirts with an American Embassy worker to escape Cuba, sleeps with her casting director in the hopes of getting her own show, convinces a wealthy businessman on his deathbed to sign over a check for cash, and accepts a movie producer’s proposal of marriage to secure a career in Hollywood. In Baby Face, directed by Alfred E. Green, Lily Powers sleeps with a succession of men, from a railroad worker to a hiring clerk to a series of managers to the president of a bank, in order to gain favors, promotions, and material wealth, and then she merely flirts her way out of any trouble she gets herself into along the way—including the deaths of two of her spurned lovers. These women may seem to be anything but typical representations of modern young women in the 1920s. Yet, is this brief summary really all there is to these two women? Or do they have another side, a more rounded and complete identity than that of cold and calculating seductress? A feminist critical analysis of the portrayal of Margo Dowling and Lily Powers reveals the representation of 1920s U.S. women in novel and film as powerful yet ultra-feminine creatures of sexuality, ambition, and nontraditional moral standards—challenging both assumed gender roles and traditional standards of femininity.

            Dos Passos wrote The Big Money as a collection of various stories, mini-biographies, newsreels, and streams of consciousness. The result is a conglomeration of 1920s life and thought. One of the ongoing stories is that of Margo Dowling, who grows up with poverty and abuse, vowing never to be weak or dependent like her adoptive mother, Agnes (Dos Passos 133). Margo eventually moves to New York City with Agnes and begins acting, but when her new stepfather rapes her, she rushes into marriage with her boyfriend, Tony, and escapes with him to live with his family in Cuba. Life in Cuba is hell for Margo, as she becomes disillusioned with her ever more controlling husband. When her newborn baby dies because of a sexually transmitted disease that Tony had acquired and passed on to Margo (196), she can no longer endure her situation. Margo decides to use her sex appeal to convince a boy working at the U.S. consulate to smuggle her back into the States. Once there, Margo focuses all her thoughts and energy on gaining independence—from poverty, from weakness, from men. She gets jobs in choruses, modeling, and acting, and eventually makes her way to Hollywood. Tony plagues her, taking her money and causing trouble, while Agnes follows her, helping when she can, as Margo struggles, plots, barters, and pushes her way to the height of status and power: Hollywood stardom.

            By the end of the novel, one can almost imagine the character Margo as the actress Barbara Stanwyck, who plays Lily Powers in the film Baby Face. The movie begins with Lily as a beautiful young woman working in her father’s speakeasy, where she is constantly pestered by the male patrons. Her problem is not helped by her father, who actually sells her company to the men. Lily finally runs away, jumping a train for New York City. Caught by a railroad worker, Lily is forced to make the first in a long line of difficult decisions: she seduces him to get out of trouble and remain on the train. Upon arriving in New York, Lily sees the Gotham Trust skyscraper. Impressed, she promptly goes inside and seduces the personnel manager to get a job. From that point on, Lily flirts, seduces, pouts, cries, and otherwise maneuvers her way to the highest position in the firm, finally winning the devotion of the president of the bank himself, Carter. Soon, Lily is living in luxury in a flat paid for by Carter, but disaster strikes when one of her spurned lovers finds her and, in a fit of jealous rage, shoots first Carter, then himself. After the “Love Nest Tragedy” (Baby Face), the new president of the bank, Trenhelm, meets with Lily. He sees through her innocent victim charade, but admires her gumption and determination. Eventually he falls in love with her and they marry—but then the bank crashes and Trenhelm lands in jail for debt. Lily, with her stash of money and jewelry, decides to leave town instead of bailing out her husband. When she realizes her mistake and returns, she finds that Trenhelm has just shot himself. She calls the ambulance in time to save him, expresses her love for him at last, and lets the money fall aside.

            These two mediums of novel and film portray similar visions of the new 1920s woman, and, at first, they may not appear to be flattering. A broad mixture of the previous decades’ radical changes had combined to form the social realities of the 1920s. During those turbulent years leading up to the era—and culture—in which we find Margo and Lily, the United States was home to suffragist and women’s movements, a sexual revolution from the strict Victorian doctrine on proper behavior, and the major shift in U.S. lifestyles from rural to urban. Beginning well before the turn of the century, Western culture witnessed the sexual liberation of women from Victorian era ethical values toward freedom from the taboo surrounding a woman’s sexual desire (Cott 42-45). This dramatic shift in social attitudes toward gender roles was still under way in the 1920s, and it was still being explored and tested by women like Margo and Lily. In the year 1920, U.S. suffragists finally won the vote for women, but after that landmark occasion, women’s movements began to fracture and become less prominent (Lemons ix-xi). By the mid-1920s, the height of the “sexual revolution overlapped with the last stages of this century’s first wave of feminism” (Skolnick 42). Margo and Lily represent both of these trends, as demonstrated by their modern attitudes toward sex and their desire and ability to empower themselves.

This transformation of social patterns occurred simultaneously with the move to urbanism, which in turn promoted a shift to a corporate, commercial business world. The urbanization of the U.S. played a large part in the gathering of new ideals and social standards. “The city’s impact [on] national life” and morals was significant as the United States became an “urban nation” and there occurred a “massive exploitation of the city’s power to amuse and entertain” (Boyer 284-287)—as seen, for example, in both The Big Money and Baby Face with their recurring themes of going to New York City or Hollywood to make a living and a life. The economic situation resulting from the shift to a corporate business world offered “new opportunities for women” (Skolnick 41) to work outside the home in office positions. Independence from their families by working and supporting themselves helped lead women “away from the watchful eyes of their traditional and family communities” (Gerhard 16). Thus, the sexual revolution of working-class girls and the shift to urban lifestyles and corporate jobs for young women had paved the way to the so-called Flapper lifestyle of the Roaring Twenties. This made for an interesting and exciting decade, as, “basking in the successes of the suffrage movement, many young middle-class women of the 1920s assumed sexual equality had been achieved and set out to enjoy their newly won prerogatives” (Gerhard 17-18). This is the point at which we meet Margo and Lily.

The preceding historical factors come into play when we analyze the definitions of gender roles and the attributes associated with femininity in The Big Money and Baby Face. During and after times of radical change, it is sometimes difficult to determine precisely what is considered “the norm” in society, and these texts reflect that uncertainty. Dos Passos seems to accept or at least acknowledge the changing roles of women in the 1920s, as he portrays his female characters in a broad range of situations with differing social statuses and varying degrees of inner strength and outer ambition. Minor or semi-minor characters tend to fill in the picture around the ambitious and determined Margo and her counterpart, Mary French. Mary, the main character in another of The Big Money’s many interwoven stories, is a social idealist, caught up in the struggle for immigrant and union workers’ rights. She ultimately ruins her health and loses all personal connections because of her focus on the cause. Other women who appear in the story often provide complex, if brief, studies of contemporary feminine roles: Agnes is the essence of frailty and motherhood (though she never gave birth and outlives two husbands), Gladys is the traditional housewife and mother (though she becomes ruthless and money-hungry in her own sphere of influence), Evelyn is the ultimate socialite, Ada the respectable artist, and so on. Each of these characters, although differing greatly from each other, gives an opposing view of womanhood than that given by Margo and Mary. As seen in the main female characters’ stories, ambitious, independent women end up either miserable and alone or devoid of moral and emotional well-being. Thus, although alternative gender roles are presented in an apparently nonbiased and open-minded manner, the end result is that traditional social expectations are, in fact, confirmed.

Baby Face is much more limited in its presentation of women characters, and may therefore be more straightforward in its portrayal of feminine attributes. The only women the audience becomes acquainted with by more than a cursory glance or a quick comment are Lily and Chico, her African American servant—and Chico is hardly a rounded character herself, appearing mainly as a foil or conscience to Lily’s decisions. Consequently, the film effectively presents us with only a single image of (white) womanhood: one that portrays women as callous, sexual, cunning, and, of course (after all, this is Hollywood), ultimately just in need of a good man in order to see the error of her ways. However, we are not led to believe that this is the norm. In fact, through the isolated comments of other women (for example, when the office girls whisper about Lily behind her back), through the various reactions of the men (primarily, that Lily ought to be fired), and even through Chico herself (as she provides an almost constant morally judgmental soundtrack by singing “St. Louis Blues”[1]), the film’s portrayal of Lily is clearly meant to be that of a deviant. Traditional gender roles are, therefore, reaffirmed through the experience of catharsis that the audience gains while witnessing Lily’s story and through the ultimate satisfaction of conventional moral expectations in the last five minutes of the film.  

Given these outwardly clear definitions of womanhood and standards of morally acceptable gender roles, it is interesting to note that those very standards are actually challenged throughout each story and even complicated by the occurrence of conflicting definitions and principles. Before Lily leaves home, she has a single ally at her father’s speakeasy: an old professor, Adolf Cragg, who quotes Nietzsche and urges Lily to escape. The presence of the Nietzsche-bearing professor in Baby Face obscures the easy judgment we are tempted to cast on Lily. Nietzsche wrote about the ever fluctuating interpretations of “good” and “truth,” and about the power of change and the strength to overcome. Adolf reminds us that Lily is in a nearly impossible situation but has the power—through her own inner strength and determination—to rise above her environment rather than becoming a product of it. When the rest of her story is viewed in this light and with an acute memory of her abusive early life, we can more readily sympathize with her decisions and reactions regarding the men she encounters and uses. Lily’s journey, therefore, is not so much a tale of moral degradation as one of a process of learning and healing, through which she must pass before she is able to accept the love that she finds with Trenhelm at the end of the film.

Margo, too, complicates her own role as anti-moral, emotionally hardened woman through her ongoing relationship with her first husband, Tony. As Margo continually nurtures and cares for Tony, even after he wrongs her in various nearly unforgivable ways, one is presented with another side of a supposedly callous woman. No longer appearing emotionally dead, Margo now seems to have a softer heart than most—she forgives, she empathizes, she aids, she protects. In a strange twist, Tony takes on the role of a child, rather than husband, of Margo, and she accepts the role of mother. Thus, a woman portrayed as almost a cautionary tale of ambition at the heavy price of inner numbness becomes a nurturing, compassionate figure of mercy. The two roles that Margo fills may seem to be irreconcilably opposed, but by joining ambition with heart, Margo shows us that the prescribed standards and definitions identified above may not be flexible enough to encompass the full range of feminine identity. Therefore, while Lily and Margo may at first appear to present cathartic stories of deviancy that eventually reinforce and uphold the audience’s moral expectations, they may actually portray a more accurate reflection of the social realities at the time—the reality of women occupying complicated, changing roles and challenging the notions of “standard” femininity.

On a more basic level of presentation, we may examine the language and film techniques used to portray the two women. Lingering shots of Lily’s body (as when her father “sells” her to a customer and the camera seems to leer at Lily with that customer’s eyes) provide a male-based point of view, ultimately forcing even female viewers to gaze at Lily with a physically—even sexually—appraising eye. In contrast, Margo is rarely physically described, and the language used to depict her is then typically non-gendered. Hence, Lily, the office worker, is presented as an object, a spectacle of womanhood and sexual grace; whereas Margo, the actress, is presented as merely human—obviously lovely but not forced upon the reader as such. Only the fact that Margo is an actress who gains her livelihood through the use of her body relegates her to the same basic level as Lily—a sexual woman.

Nonetheless, these two powerhouses of sexuality are not confined to roles of “mere” objects. Quite the contrary, each of the women seems so overtly aware of this representation of herself that she is able to use the very male-based point of view that objectifies her to her own advantage. She contradicts the gender role into which she is placed by understanding the control it ultimately gives her over the opposite sex: in a strange twist of power, she manages to escape the gender role by utilizing it. Knowing that she is the object of desire, Lily chooses not to be victimized but to take advantage of those who desire her. By doling out sexual favors in exchange for monetary gains and business advancements, Lily plays the object while simultaneously objectifying the men who have thus wronged her. In this way, she shifts the standard view of this behavior, placing blame for the transgression upon the man, not the woman. We can see this in every relationship Lily goes through from her very first “indiscretion” on the train, when she could not have used the train worker if he had not been willing to take what she offered him. Similarly, Margo knowingly presents herself as a feminine object of beauty, something to be looked at and superficially admired. In fact, she becomes almost obsessive about her appearance (both within and outside of her professional life) as she gets a job modeling dresses, spends hours primping and picking out the perfect outfit, makes dubious monetary decisions based solely on appearances (such as going into debt to purchase a Rolls Royce), and so on. While appearing frivolous at first glance, each of these decisions actually assists Margo in gaining greater recognition, which leads to greater status and, ultimately, greater power. As an actress, her appearance is inextricably tied to her success, and she understands this and utilizes it to such personal advantage that the question of whether she ought to be viewed as an object seems, at last, ludicrous. Being an object is perfectly all right with Margo so long as it gets her where she wants to be and where she eventually ends up: on top.

The social realities of the urban United States and the roles of women within it during the 1920s were complex, and they emerged from the juxtaposition of this country’s first experiences with feminism, urbanism, and sexual revolution. Gender roles were being examined, tested, reassigned, and pushed to their limits, while stereotypes of masculinity and femininity were in a constant state of flux. In fact, the novel and film examined here have their own definitions of femininity challenged by the characters within them—Adolf gives Lily a complex background with hints of a deeply rooted moral center, while Tony gives Margo the opportunity to show a softer side of her hardened exterior. The two women even manage to defy their own representations, as they are shown and described in sexual terms but learn to use their objectification shrewdly to their own advantage. These portraits of life in the Roaring Twenties provide a view of women that is quite extraordinary. Lily and Margo exploit themselves and use men to get what they want, their power is gained only through their sexuality, and they seem to rely more on their looks than on their brains. However, in a beautifully understated reversal of expectations, Lily and Margo actually use their brains adeptly in order to get ahead with their looks: they are able to gain power from men through their sexuality only because of the men’s own desire to exploit them. These women emerge as both traditionally feminine and contemporarily feminist, as objects and objectifiers, as powerfully ambitious and inherently decent—in short, they are entirely human.

Works Cited

Baby Face. Dir. Alfred E. Green. Perf. Barbara Stanwyck. Warner Bros., 1933.

Boyer, Paul S. Urban Masses and Moral Order in America: 1820-1920. Boston: Harvard UP,

1978.

Cott, Nancy F. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987.

Dos Passos, John. The Big Money. 1933. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Gerhard, Jane F. Desiring Revolution: Second-Wave Feminism and the Rewriting of American

Sexual Thought, 1920 to 1982. New York: Columbia UP, 2001.

“St. Louis Blues.” 29 Jan. 2000. Heptune.com. 17 April 2009 <http://www.heptune.com/

stlouisb.html>.

Lemons, J. Stanley. The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s. 1973. Pref. J. Stanley

Lemons. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1990.

Skolnick, Arlene S. Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty. New

York: Basic Books, 1991.

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[1] Oh, that St. Louis woman, with her diamond rings,
She pulls my man around by her apron strings.
And if it wasn't for powder and her store-bought hair,
Oh, that man of mine wouldn't go nowhere. (“St. Louis Blues.”)