Throughout the 1920's the role women had under men was making a drastic change. Women prior to the 1920's were seen as worthless and inferior to men. They were essentially controlled by men and therefore were powerless. However throughout the 1920's women started to move away from the stereotypes that were placed on them and strived live their lives according to their personal American Dream. These changes in women's roles are present in Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby. The two main women characters, Daisy and Jordan, both portray different and important characteristics of the normal women growing up in the 1920's. Therefore I believe Fitzgerald aims to portray the changing women roles that were occurring at that particular point of time when the Great Gatsby was written.
Throughout the 1920's women began to rise up in society thereby trying to eliminate the stereotype of male dominance. On June 4th 1919, the nineteenth amendment was passed and then ratified on August 18th 1920, giving all women in America the right to vote. "The first generation of white western suffragists were an iconoclastic of self-identified feminists and freethinkers, "free-lovers" and "Communists" to their opponents. Many had histories of involvement in women's rights, abolitionism, Spiritualism, Unitarianism, and other "isms" in the East" ( Mead 17). This illustrates how the first women to rise up were predominantly Individualists who were prepare to stand up for what they believed in. Rebecca Mead also mentions how the first women suffragists were "often divorced or widowed and usually self-supporting" (Mead 17). These women therefore began to show the characteristics that only men were thought to have. "The western woman suffragists utilized radically modern direct-action tactics derived from the labor movement and popular politics" (Mead 4). Suffragists in the west therefore used non-violent techniques to voice their opinions unlike the violent suffragettes at that time.
