it entirely depends on your point of view.
1920 sounds great, but mostly if you (collectively) were a white protestant male.
not so good in general because of gems like the Sedition Act of 1918, the* Espionage Act of 1917*, or if you (collective you) were a philippine or puerto rican who wasn’t a fan of living in a US colony; a Haitian or citizen of the Dominican Republic who didn’t like US military occupation and US installed puppet governments, or a native american, black (including blacks who like to vote) or catholic from the wrong country of origin. still in office: Woodrow Wilson, probably the worst civil rights president ever. still in the future: Brown v Board (separate but equal and Jim Crow were still going strong), as well as the KKK; the *Miranda * case (police could and did beat confessions out of the right kind of suspects).
1920? I’d love it, if I were the right kind of person.
I don’t understand the 1920 proposal, either. Racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, homophobia were all comparatively greater problems in America then, than they are today.
Even the issues of divorce, contraception, abortion, and gay marriage may be – at the very least – a reaction against very real repressive elements in the culture in prior decades, for example:
–divorce: women in unhappy marriages with no literally no way out, as they had no financial independence.
–gay marriage: in past decades, homosexuals were practically as “hunted” a class of citizens as Catholics are today in some Islamic societies; they had no legal protections against discrimination and were mostly intimidated into silence and secrecy (keep in mind that a repressive Islamic society can use the argument that comparisons between religion and race are invalid, because religion is a lifestyle choice and a
behavior, a behavior that can be changed; this is the double-edged sword in arguing, along similar lines, that comparisons between race and sexual orientation are invalid)
–contraception: it was women who stood the most to gain from this; for a woman to decide how many children to have was an assertion of autonomy and independence, and goes hand-in-hand with women in the workforce (including married women in the workforce)
–abortion: again, an assertion of female autonomy; if this was an overcompensation, then it was an overcompensation fueled by decades, if not centuries, of sexism and lack of female autonomy (it wasn’t too long ago, after all, that there was a certain limited number of “female professions” like teacher, nurse, flight attendant, secretary; one could practically count them on one’s fingers); rightly or wrongly, a woman had – for the first time – the same benefit that a man
always had, namely the right to separate the procreative element of sex from the pleasurable element (man have always had this right, and always will, not morally but in reality)
As regards women, sexual harrassment in the workplace was once considered a working woman’s “lot in life.”
The demise of censorship laws, and the introduction of violence in movies, and pornography, went hand-in-hand with greater liberty of expression, of which religious liberty is itself a manifestation. A society that enforced strict standards of decency was also, not surprisingly, a society that enforced standards of decency regarding such things as race-mixing (when television was more “decent”, people of color were conspicuously absent from television screens), religious belief (practicing Jews were all but invisible, in the years when television was “clean and decent”, and Jews were often as closeted as homosexuals), and the proper role of a woman vis-a-vis a man (either housewife or teacher of young children).
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