"Paying for 'Freedom' with Her Health": Rising Life Expectancy, Women's Aging, and American Youth Culture

This paper will explore women's aging in the early twentieth century amidst rapidly rising life expectancy, an exploding American youth culture, and the interrelated claims that modern life was taking a disproportionately heavy physical toll on women. By the 1920s, popular descriptions of women's aging made growing old the equivalent of growing careless; women aged when they grew careless of appearance, careless of diet, and careless about maintaining active social lives. Popular culture stressed that it was crucial for them to look and to be young in the fast-paced modern world, where confidence, health, and energy were essential to success.Meanwhile, even as women's political, economic, and social roles expanded, doctors warned that women's activities outside the home were causing them to deteriorate physically and to age prematurely. Significantly, the things they pointed to as the causes of women's supposed ill health and premature aging-working outside the home, staying up late, wearing short skirts and make-up, exercising, smoking, drinking, and dieting-were the very things that women were doing by the 1920s to define themselves as modern, and even as young.

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