When Anita Loos wrote her best-selling novels, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1928), American women were in a state of flux. Buoyed by the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, many middle-class and upper-class women expected to play a larger role in public life. Nonetheless, men expected women to undertake the same roles of wife and mother as women of previous generations — a demand that put many women and men in conflict. While suffrage had not eliminated the myths and beliefs that bound women earlier in the century, women believed they had tools similar to those implicitly endorsed by Horatio Alger, such as education and determination, to enable them to move into the public sphere.
Horatio Alger With a Jump Shot: Michael Jordan and the American Dream
