In honor of Women’s History Month, professors hosted an event called Gender and Sexuality where they discussed women in the 1920’s and the parallels to be looked at when discussing that time period vs. the current.
Professor Vanessa Crispin-Peralta and Professor Sean Dinces from the history department at LBCC hosted the event via Zoom.
Dinces discussed advertisements and their evolution from WWI into the 1920’s and how ads mainstreamed the idea of women’s independence. Crispin-Peralta discussed sexuality and how that idea was played within the 20’s. As well as women who defied gender norms of the day, using Gladys Bentley as her prime example.
Crispin-Peralta has been part of the Women’s History Month development at LBCC for the past 3 years. When trying to think about a topic to discuss as an event, she was inspired by looking at what was going on 100 years ago and noticing the parallels between then and now. She said, “I was like ‘Wow if we have this moment in the past 100 years ago, could that teach us something about where we’re going’?”
Dinces’ emphasis is more on the business side, so he took that expertise and was able to put his own spin on the topic being discussed by focusing on women in advertising.
In regard to his research, Dinces said, “[They were starting to] advertise to women as consumers in their own right. Before when women would appear in advertisements it was like for the mother or wife that is consuming on behalf of the family…what you start to see in the 20’s is the businesses start to realize, with the success of World War I propaganda, they could really use advertising to create new desires, new markets, and new consumers and they really use a lot of persuasive imagery and text in advertisements in the 20’s to convey the message to women that they can be independent consumers, which is very profitable for businesses.”
Crispin-Peralta said that she found this topic inherently fascinating. Dinces came at this from the angle that there are a lot of interesting problems and debates happening now and the same issues and movements that happened then can be added onto the movements and issues happening now.
Not only was there a pandemic 100 years ago, there was also a lot of racial violence when the world was coming out of WWI. There is also a shared tendency now that was present in the 20’s where people want to give themselves a break from politics, Dinces said
Part of the 1920’s was the women’s movement. Which, compared to the women’s marches that have been happening since 2017, there is a major difference. While the 1921 goal of feminism was achieved, it was only really achieved for middle-class white women. Whereas the women’s march is not “a middle-class white woman’s movement” Crispin-Peralta said.
“Even though there was openness in the Harlem Renaissance [in the 20’s] that was such a niche little spot where that could happen, and even there it wasn’t always space…but now there is a lot more acceptance of things that were considered risque in Harlem at that time,” Peralta said.
An ideology Dinces brought up was the economic ideology, even though it ebbs and flows it is now always constant. The example that Dinces used was the Robinhood Gamestop instance, which in short, is normal people, not just stock brokers or hedge funds, buying stocks through apps like Robinhood and making money through it. Which is problematic because there is a mindset that because people have better technology, it won’t come crashing down, but that very much could still happen.
The professors each had one thing they hoped that students took away from the event. For Crispin-Peralta, she hopes to challenge the thought of gender issues being over. And for Dinces, it was a more in depth understanding of the 20’s.