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Why I Don't Mind Washing Dishes... By Hand
26 comments:
Beautiful view! I admit though I would LOVE to have a dishwasher! :)ReplyDelete
There's nothing like a good view out the farm house kitchen window. I have an urban view that I'm working on but it doesn't compare to the wide open spaces you have to look at. My dish washing experience is rinsing dishes and putting them in the dishwasher. Why you ask do I clean them off before the dishwasher? I tell folks that my dishwasher is basically a sanitizer. I do not save energy by turning off the dry cycle. I think that it's important to kill them (I know it's supposed to be those) germs especially with a little five year old petri dish incubating every thing that comes to school.ReplyDelete
I wrote about washing dishes today too!ReplyDelete
Let me borrow the view and I wont mind washing either! ;)ReplyDelete
never owned a dishwasher... what kind of city gal was you???ReplyDelete
I wash some dishes by hand and some using the dishwasher.ReplyDelete
Wonderful view. No wonder you don't mind hand washing the dishes!ReplyDelete
I am SO with you on this - I handwash all my dishes, and use the dishwasher (that was here when we moved in) as a drainboard. Your view is beautiful! But I disagree about not seeing another building..... if you squint and look really, really hard, you can see my house 1000 miles in the distance :)ReplyDelete
You are definitely a better woman then most! And might I say, I'd enjoy doing dishes to that view too :DReplyDelete
Actually, I kind of already like doing dishes, but I'm just a weird child. LOL
Hey there ... great view! My last home did not have a dishwasher and I complained ALL THE TIME that I was the only woman in Canada without a dishwasher. Update - now I have a dishwasher and guess what I do ALL THE TIME??? Wash by hand! Have a great day!ReplyDelete
Sometimes I don't mind either and with that view, awesome. I tend to really like my dishwasher as I spent most of my childhood washing lots and lots of dishes. With that to look at it might have been a lot more fun.ReplyDelete
I would do dishes by hand too if I had that view! I do about half of my dishes by hand as I look upon a wooden privacy fence and a potted plant. It's literally 2 and half feet in front of the kitchen window. sigh.....ReplyDelete
I don't think I could give up my dishwasher...I didn't have one for awhile when we were building one time and I got so tired of doing dishes...always dishes in the sink or drying...between a dishwasher and the washing maching...would be a hard choice for me..ReplyDelete
Hi, I gave you an award on my blog. Stop by and check it out!ReplyDelete
Nice view out your window! My view is the pasture behind the house and a lot of times my boys are out there looking in at me. A fine sight, I don't have a dish washer either, never have, don't need one either! :-)ReplyDelete
I could was a few dishes looking at that view.ReplyDelete
I do have a dishwasher, but not everything can go in it (I mean certain pots and pans, not furniture or dogs or cats or something; not sure why I felt the need to explain that, but you never know and better safe than sorry ;-)), so you could have a dishwasher and still enjoy your beautiful view. But I'm sure there's nothing wrong with doing the dishes by hand.ReplyDelete
No dishwasher? That is a deal breaker with me.ReplyDelete
Come to think of it, anything to do with cleaning I could do without.
I think I need to go play the lotto......
We have a dishwasher-brand new. But, two years ago we stopped using it! Not only did our electric bill go down by $30.00 a month, I really feel our dishes etc. are cleaner when done by hand. I run the darn thing about once a month-empty!!ReplyDelete
Your view is so peaceful. When I visit I will help with dinner dihes!
xo, misha
- AnonymousOctober 7, 2010 at 11:11 PM
That is a gorgeous view to do the washing up with!ReplyDelete
You have never had a dishwasher! Girl! I do both hand wash the big items and watch the rest in the dishwasher, I can't STAND to have dishes in the sink or on the counter.ReplyDelete
But there is something to be said to having your hands in warm soapy water and washing, it almost puts you in a trance.
- AnonymousOctober 10, 2010 at 6:56 PM
There are always a few things each day that I choose to wash by hand. Actually I like the feel of the warm soapy water on my hands as they are a touch arthritic so it's soothing. I don't have a window over my sink though. Oh boo hoo me.ReplyDelete
I really REALLY wish I could live out in the country... or the edge of town. But that might be a bad idea... I'd zone out all day looking out the window like that. LOL!ReplyDelete
What a lovely view - we look out at our garden which is second best to your view :)ReplyDelete
They would have to pry my dishwasher out of my cold dead hands, LOL, but...ReplyDelete
I would love to have a window in my kitchen.
What a great view you must have, such beauty.
PS, the October field of sunflowers in my calender are just lovely.
Jen @ Muddy Boot Dreams
When our new kitchen is finished, I'll have a window looking out to the backyard (which includes the pond area), and I'll also have my bird feeders there. I can't wait. But, guess what... my new kitchen will also have a dishwasher. LOL First time I've ever owned a dishwasher. Oh well, it's by the sink, so I can gaze out the window as I load the dishwasher. ahahahaReplyDelete

subset: commoncrawl


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If there was any lingering doubt that Brutalism — the architectural style derided for everything the name implies — was back in fashion, the "Atlas of Brutalist Architecture" quashes it with a monumental thump. At 560 pages representing some 878 works of architecture in over 100 countries, the outsize volume is part reference tool, part coffee table book, and certainly part of an ongoing design trend favoring big, big books.
AC Martin & Associates, Alison Smithson, Architecture, Articles, Charles F. Murphy & Associates, Chris Grimley, Hans Asplund, Jean Dubuffet, Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, Mark Pasnik, Michael Kubo, Peter Smithson, Reyner Banham, Yeekai Lim


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Steven Moffat's Sherlock has always labored under some imposing shadows. As the most-adapted character of all time, Sherlock Holmes has plenty of competition: Vasily Livanov, Jeremy Brett, Peter Cushing, Jonny Lee Miller. And Moffat's also up against Arthur Conan Doyle, who got so sick of of Holmes he literally threw him off a cliff, only to bring him back because he was desperate for cash and wanted fans to stop chasing him in the street screaming for more.
Nearly every incarnation of Holmes that's run long enough has had to tackle one of the most awkward scenes in canon, in which a returned Sherlock announces himself to Watson. The scene itself is pure Victorian fan service, with a disguised Sherlock casing Watson's crime scene and then sneaking into 221B for his reveal, followed by apologies and a loving welcome home. Depending on the script and the leads, it can be a joyful moment or a poignant one. (I still pine for a revival of the TV-movie series from the early 2000s, with Ian Hart as an incomparable Watson, just to see how he'd tackle it.)
So how does this Sherlock handle it? At a restaurant, with Holmes as a high-snot waiter interrupting Watson's proposal to Mary Morstan. John, understandably, can't process the deception and attacks him; cut to a less-posh place, where the conversation picks up directly until John attacks him; cut to a deli, where the conversation picks up directly. Sherlock assures John sotto voce that John's missed this, insults Watson's moustache (again), and bids goodnight to Mary, who murmurs, "I like him," to John when they're alone.
And that's Moffat's return to Sherlock this episode in a nutshell: Some clever edits tipping into overdone while burying character beats, Watson's internal conflict dismissed, another woman who just can't help but enjoy the sociopathic little scamp, and a healthy spoonful of fan service to make the medicine go down.
Maybe a more-than-healthy dollop. Moffat has a very direct and sometimes antagonistic relationship with his shows' fans, whose attention he seems to equally crave and hold in contempt. One of the most off-putting threads in "The Empty Hearse" is its attempts to illustrate how Sherlock survived the Fall, for which Moffat assured viewers the answer was forthcoming. Spoilers: nope. Instead, we get a collection of fan scenarios that could have been lifted from Tumblr. Anderson's involves a kiss with Molly; in another, Sherlock and giggly co-conspirator Moriarty lean in for a rooftop snog (doesn't happen, of course), thanks to the imagination of a dreamy Sherlock fangirl. Sherlock later outlines a solution of his own, but the show winkingly determines that, too, is a lie.
The thing is, it's not actually necessary to explain the particulars. The importance is its effect on a grieving Watson, and the show would have fallen flat on that alone, since Sherlock never apologizes. It takes a near-death experience for John to reconcile with him—one of the more broken Holmes and Watson partnerships to appear on-screen. Moffat made much of having the answer—only to come back and suggest that anyone interested in particulars was not only wrong but laughable. So what begins as a thin gimmick quickly gets exhausted.
As with Doctor Who, Moffat has become his show's biggest problem—this episode is primarily concerned with being as cool and implacable as the Sherlock it's created. (We're saving man-child stuff for later, I assume.) Much ado about the Belstaff coat? Cumberbatch's parents in a cameo as Sherlock's parents? Tearful declarations of feeling at the climax of the action? Sufficient declarations of No Homo beforehand? Occasional, often dismissive nods to the canon? Moffat has it all; it's going to be a meta season.
It would be a shame if the season spins out this way. When the show can get off its hamster wheel, it's possessed of an engaging supporting cast who make great work of their material, and who could use a little more to do. A scene of John visiting a stung Mrs. Hudson to make halting apologies for his absence brings back their lovely rapport in just a few sentences, and in the moments he's allowed to react to Sherlock's return, Martin Freeman's mingled relief and fury collapse him like a stomach punch. Amanda Abbington (Freeman's real-life partner) makes a low-key Mary, though the "liar" that appeared in Sherlock's assessment of her is probably going to bite John in the ass. Mark Gatiss, when he can remember to act, has his usual easy chemistry with Cumberbatch, and an interesting beat about enforced loneliness that hopefully might lead somewhere. And Rupert Graves, who's beautifully milks every moment of his time here, gives Lestrade the line delivery of the night after Sherlock announces himself—growling "Oh, you bastard" from around a cigarette. (Then he hugs him, of course; everyone on this show is mandated to forgive Sherlock anything.)
But the standout this episode is Louise Brealey, whose Molly serves as a barometer of Sherlock's devastating friendly fire. (Even this is meta; we're assured Molly was instrumental in the Reichenbach ruse, but Sherlock never cares enough to give specifics.) Brought in for a day of Watsoning as Sherlock tries to get back into the swing of things, Molly provides enough forensic knowledge to make Sherlock jealous—a telling detail that would have been interesting to deconstruct. But when she asks him what's really going on and is told the day was her thank-you for services rendered, Molly flinches back against the gesture, so tightly coiled that her very intensity silently calls Sherlock to task.
As always, he needs it. Cumberbatch, a capable actor whose Holmes ranges from serviceable to very good depending on the material, finds himself with a thankless task this episode. He's in fine form as a callous narcissist, but for now, introspection takes a backseat to re-establishing his flash with a public that's missed him (both with the show and the audience at home–told you we were in for a meta season).
His Holmesian muscles aren't particularly flexed, given a standard procedural in which Sherlock's called on to discover a terrorist cell intent on blowing up Parliament on Guy Fawkes Day, which seems like the sort of thing British Intelligence might be looking out for on an annual basis. But the procedural this time is an afterthought (Conan Doyle couldn't be bothered after a while, either), and it's in his relationship with Watson that this episode rightly hangs its hopes. The plot exists to get the pair of them in an exploding subway car for a heart-to-heart. Unfortunately, the episode's attempt to balance Watson's palpable grief with determined slyness undermines both approaches.
For two years, John's been grappling with a loss that left him feeling helpless, guilty, and alone, and in an episode that has plenty of time for cameos by Sherlock's parents, we get mere moments of his grief. (In canon, Watson takes up the investigative mantle, but this Watson's sworn it off. It's an interesting character beat that fits this John—whose devotion to Sherlock has always had less to do with enjoying his methods than becoming personally closer—but it slips by unaddressed.) Sherlock did himself no favors with his reintroduction, and by letting others in on the ruse—duplicities John discovers by degrees—there's a breach of trust the show would have to make real effort to address. Yet it largely refuses to engage Watson's grievances, even sticking him in a bonfire for Sherlock to rescue as a reason to swiftly return to the fold. Even in the weaponized subway car, Sherlock wrings tearful forgiveness from John by convincing him they're moments from death, and then flicks the bomb's off-switch and mocks John for doubting him. It doesn't so much re-establish a snarky equilibrium so much as it re-establishes that Moffat's Sherlock is a total dick.
The season will hopefully earn its lightheartedness by making Sherlock atone for the manner of his return, in which he comes closer than ever to mirroring Moriarty (though given the tone issues, I'm not sure the show still sees the parallel, even if it really should). As such, the final few minutes introduce a sinister Bond villain alongside some wedding shenanigans, promising intrigue, and whimsy. And their last scene gives us a perfunctory reconciliation between Holmes and Watson before Sherlock presents himself for his adoring public, apparently marking John's grievances handled.
We'll see what this season does for the rest of us.
Stray observations:
- Holmes was bending over my chair, his flask in his hand./ "My dear Watson," said the well-remembered voice, "I owe you a thousand apologies." - "The Adventure of the Empty House," Arthur Conan Doyle.
- Sounds like we could be getting more of Moran this season.
- Glad we spared a moment to make fun of Molly's Sherlockian physical type; she definitely needed some more patronization by the text.
- "I am not gay." Moffat, I do not care whatsoever one way or the other about this, but after six 90-minute episodes rife with queerbait, it's past being a running joke. Let it go.
- I enjoyed John blurting "Mind Palace!" like the catchphrase of a Saturday morning cartoon, where Sherlock would rise into the air and spin slowly until an answer occurred.
- "I don't shave for Sherlock Holmes." "You should put that on a t-shirt." If this actually ends up on a shirt, I don't know what I'm going to do. If it's already on a shirt, don't tell me.
- For those who dig a little meta in their Sherlock, 1988's Without a Clue brilliantly deconstructed the myth behind Holmes, with Ben Kingsley as a Watson doing all the heavy lifting, and Michael Caine as the actor he hired, who's absorbed the credit like a sponge. It's the Galaxy Quest of Sherlock Holmes; recommended.


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WASHINGTON — With his first address to Congress, President Donald Trump has an opportunity to refocus his young administration on the economic issues that helped him get elected. His allies hope it will help him move beyond the distractions and self-inflicted wounds that he has dealt with so far.
Trump's advisers say he will use his prime-time speech Tuesday to declare early progress on his campaign promises, including withdrawing the U.S. from a sweeping Pacific Rim trade pact, and to map a path ahead on thorny legislative priorities, including health care, infrastructure, and military spending.
"We're going to spend a lot more money on military," Trump told "Fox & Friends" in an interview aired Tuesday, saying he could stand to see even $30 billion more than what's being recommended.
"We're going to get involved in negotiating. We're going to be able to get, I think, a lot more product for a buck and I'm going to be very, very serious about it," he said.
The White House said Trump has been gathering ideas for the address from the series of listening sessions he's been holding with law enforcement officials, union representatives, coal miners and others. Aides said he was still tinkering with the speech Monday night.
Republicans, impatient to begin making headway on an ambitious legislative agenda, hope Trump arrives on Capitol Hill armed with specifics on replacing the "Obamacare" health care law and overhauling the nation's tax system, two issues he's so far talked about in mostly general terms. More broadly, some Republicans are anxious for the president to set aside his feuds with the media, the intelligence community and the courts, which have overshadowed the party's policy priorities.
"Results aren't going to come from that," said Judd Gregg, the former Republican senator from New Hampshire. "Results are going to come from driving the policies he said he would do."
The pressure from Republican lawmakers makes this a critical moment for a new president who ran for office on a pledge to swiftly shake up Washington and follow through on the failed promises of career politicians.
While most new presidents enjoy a honeymoon period, Trump is saddled with record low approval ratings — just 44 percent of Americans approve of his job performance, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey. His most sweeping executive order was blocked by federal courts, sending advisers scrambling to write a new travel and immigration directive, which the president is expected to sign on Wednesday.
Morale is also plummeting among some White House staffers following a string of leaks that have left aides questioning each other. On Sunday, Politico reported that White House press secretary Sean Spicer had sprung surprise "phone checks" for members of his communications team after details from a staff meeting were made public.
Trump said in the interview Tuesday that he "would have handled it differently than Sean. But Sean handles it his way, and I'm OK with it."
In public, Trump has continued to speak about his presidency with his usual confident bluster, declaring that there's "never been a presidency that's done so much in such a short period of time." But he's privately vented frustrations to friends and associates, particularly about what he sees as the ineffectiveness of the White House's communications efforts and the scattershot nature of his first weeks in office.
In the Fox interview Tuesday, Trump gave himself an overall "A plus" for effort, but conceded, "In terms of messaging, I would give myself a C or a C plus."
Trump recently complained to one associate that the White House was trying to do too many things at once and none of it was breaking through. He told another associate that the White House had lost control of the story surrounding Michael Flynn, who was fired as national security adviser after misleading Vice President Mike Pence and others about his contacts with Russia.
The White House looked to be finding its footing for a stretch last week, beginning with Trump's widely praised rollout of Flynn's replacement, Lt. General H.R McMaster. On domestic issues, the White House largely stuck to its script, focusing on manufacturing and the budget. Fewer aides appeared on television, part of an effort to apply some message discipline to a White House that has frequently contradicted itself.
One of the most notable changes was made by the president himself, who scaled back his use of Twitter for a few days, particularly in the pre-dawn hours.
One aide said the reduction in Trump's early morning tweets was a result of his ending his habit of watching "Morning Joe," the MSNBC show hosted by Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, longtime friends of the president who have been
critical of some of his early moves.
Brzezinski said Trump made similar claims of avoiding the TV during the campaign. "Then I would see him and Joe talking and he would say 'Joe, you know I really watch every day,'" she said.
The aide who told the story about Trump and early-morning TV insisted on anonymity in order to discuss internal White House dealings. So did other advisers and associates cited in this story.
By the end of last week, the White House was back in the throes of some of the same sideshows that had overshadowed the policy issues Trump advisers have insisted they want to focus on. The president doubled down on his media bashing during a free-wheeling speech to conservative activists. Questions about his advisers' contacts with Russian intelligence agents were revived by revelations that chief of staff Reince Priebus discussed the matter with high-level FBI officials, in the midst of an investigation into those contacts.


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NEW YORK — Being bold paid off for new "Jeopardy!" mega-champion Ken Jennings, while it didn't for his opponents.
Jennings won his third match in the "Jeopardy!" "Greatest of all Time" contest televised on Tuesday, an event that's been a prime-time hit for ABC. He pocketed $1 million by dispatching James Holzhauer, who won one match, and Brad Rutter, who came up empty.
The gamesmanship between the three men considered the most-accomplished and best-known in the show's modern history proved entertaining while containing all the tension of a major sporting match.
Jennings took a strong lead in the first game of Tuesday's match by borrowing a strategy popularized by Holzhauer, twice betting all of his points on a Daily Double and winning. He signaled his intention by imitating the gesture of a poker player pushing all of his chips to the center of the table.
In a "Final Jeopardy" question about Greece, Jennings bet all 32,800 of his points on the clue: "This area of Greece, home to Pan, is synonymous with a rural paradise; it's a setting for Vergil's shepherd poems the 'Ecologues.' He correctly answered, "What is Arcadia?"
Holzhauer was leading in the second game of the match, where the "Final Jeopardy" question asked the competitors to identify the non-title character in a Shakespearean tragedy with the most speeches.
Jennings correctly answered, "Who is Iago?" But he bet none of his points.
That left an opening for Holzhauer to take the match if he bet all of his points and got it right. He bet all of his points, but answered, "Who is Horatio?"
At the end, Hozhauer and Rutter hoisted Jennings on their shoulders in honor. The losers each took home $250,000.
It's hard not to imagine they'll play again sometime, given the show's success. But the night had a tinge of nostalgia and sadness as veteran host Alex Trebek fights pancreatic cancer.


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Associated Press//January 4, 2013
//January 4, 2013
WASHINGTON — Union Station's leaseholders have agreed to pay the District of Columbia $7.5 million in taxes dating to 2008 to settle a dispute over the amounts owed to the government.
Under the settlement Friday, Union Station Investco LLC and Union Station Redevelopment Corp. agreed to pay taxes for five years from 2008 to 2012.
The leaseholders contended for years that they weren't required to pay the district's "Possessory Interest Tax" because Union Station is owned by the federal government. A D.C. Superior Court judge ruled in April 2012 that they couldn't challenge the tax without first paying the amounts owed.
The agreement resulted in a dismissal of a lawsuit challenging the tax's validity.
In 2010, the D.C. Council considered waiving taxes to free up cash for improvements to the historic property.


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The original Mac was the first mass-market computer to be networkable right out of the box. A popular saying of the time boasted that LocalTalk ensured that "no Mac is an island."
Today's Gigabit Ethernet is well over 4,000 times faster than LocalTalk, and even faster Ethernet protocols already exist. The 10-Gigabit Ethernet standard was established in 2002, and compliant hardware is readily available—albeit pricey. A standard with both 40-Gbps and 100-GBps modes is on the horizon.
Just don't expect faster-than-Gigabit Ethernet on your Mac, because there's little need for such performance outside of high-end data centers and supercomputing environments. The real action on the networking front today is in the area of connecting to the Internet faster, more reliably, and on-the-go.
For example, Wi-Fi is all well and good, but in a few years we'll wonder how we ever put up with having to be so close to a wireless access point. Broadband is about to go long-range, with signal distances measured in miles, not feet. The only question is which technology will take us into that future.
The players
The competitors can be broken down into two camps. First, there are those that are evolving from current mobile phone technologies, such as EVDO (Evolution Data-Optimized), HSPA (High-Speed Packet Access), and their various flavors. Then there are the new kids on the block, built from the ground up to be data carriers, such as WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) and LTE (Long-Term Evolution).
While EVDO, HSPA, and their ilk are currently about as fast as WiMAX and LTE (on paper, at least), the new guys have more room to grow. WiMAX 1.0, the current version, maxes out at around 60 Mbps; version 1.5 is scheduled to reach 125 Mbps in late 2009, and version 2.0 will exceed 300 Mbps in late 2010 or early 2011. LTE will match those speeds but will lag behind by a year or two.
Which will dominate? According to projections from Intel (a WiMAX champion and chipset maker), the answer is neither. Both will coexist for the foreseeable future, while service providers develop and install the needed infrastructure.
Then there's traditional wired Internet access, with three major competitors: faster implementations of familiar DSL and cable, and the new wiry kid, optical fiber—namely, FiOS (fiber optic service) from Verizon.
Today's predominant DSL protocol, ADSL2+, maxes out at around 25 Mbps. The next flavor, VDSL (very high speed digital subscriber line), promises to double that, but it's not quite ready. DSL, however, is and will continue to be cramped by broadband-limiting phone lines.
Version 3.0 of a new cable protocol with the numbing acronym DOCSIS (data over cable service interface specification) has the potential of 160-Mbps downloads and 120-Mbps uploads. Even better, it's already being tested in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, with an implementation that tops out at 50 Mbps for downloads and 5 Mbps for uploads, for a cool $150 per month.
Best guess
Our money, however, is on optical fiber. Verizon's FiOS, for example, is already available in multiple markets for monthly fees ranging from $43 for 10-Mbps downloads and 2-Mbps uploads to $140 for 50 Mbps 20 Mbps, respectively. One reason for our fibrous preference is that optical fiber, being thin and light, is easier to install than cable.
So how fast will your Internet access be, and when? Well, the Fiber-to-the-Home Council has asked Congress to set a goal of universally available 100-Mbps downloads and 100-Mbps uploads by 2015. Our advice: Don't hold your breath. Your Internet access will get faster, but not that quickly.
[Rik Myslewski has been writing about the Mac since 1989. He has been editor in chief of MacAddict (now Mac|Life), executive editor of MacUser and director of MacUser Labs, and executive producer of Macworld Live. He now writes for The Register.]


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A FIRST-CLASS REVOLT AGAINST THE accepted American order was certainly taking place during those early years of the Post-war Decade, but it was one with which Nikolai Lenin had nothing whatever to do. The shock troops of the rebellion were not alien agitators, but the sons and daughters of well-to-do American families, who knew little about Bolshevism and cared distinctly less, and their defiance was expressed not in obscure radical publications or in soap-box speeches, but right across the family breakfast table into the horrified ears of conservative fathers and mothers. Men and women were still shivering at the Red Menace when they awoke to the no less alarming Problem of the Younger Generation, and realized that if the constitution were not in danger, the moral code of the country certainly was.
This code, as it currently concerned young people, might have been roughly summarized as follows: Women were the guardians of morality; they were made of finer stuff than men and were expected to act accordingly. Young girls must look forward in innocence (tempered perhaps with a modicum of physiological instruction) to a romantic love match which would lead them to the altar and to living-happily-ever-after; and until the "right man" came along they must allow no male to kiss them. It was expected that some men would succumb to the temptations of sex, but only with a special class of outlawed women; girls of respectable families were supposed to have no such temptations. Boys and girls were permitted large freedom to work and play together, with decreasing and well-nigh nominal chaperonage, but only because the code worked so well on the whole that a sort of honor system was supplanting supervision by their elders; it was taken for granted that if they had been well brought up they would never take advantage of this freedom. And although the attitude toward smoking and drinking by girls differed widely in different strata of society and different parts of the country, majority opinion held that it was morally wrong for them to smoke and could hardly imagine them showing the effects of alcohol.
The war had not long been over when cries of alarm from parents teachers, and moral preceptors began to rend the air. For the boys an( girls just growing out of adolescence were making mincemeat of this code.
The dresses that the girls-and for that matter most of the older women-were wearing seemed alarming enough. In July, 1920, a fashion-writer reported in the New York Times that "the American woman . . . has lifted her skirts far beyond any modest limitation," which was another way of saying that the hem was now all of nine inches above the ground. It was freely predicted that skirts would come down again in the winter of 1920-21, but instead they climbed a few scandalous inches farther. The flappers wore thin dresses, short-sleeved and occasionally (in the evening) sleeveless; some of the wilder young things rolled their stockings below their knees, revealing to the shocked eyes of virtue a fleeting glance of shin-bones and knee-cap; and many of them were visibly using cosmetics. "The intoxication of rouge," earnestly explained Dorothy Speare in Dancers in the Dark, "is an insidious vintage known to more girls than mere man can ever believe." Useless for frantic parents to insist that no lady did such things; the answer was that the daughters of ladies were doing it, and even retouching their masterpieces in public. Some of them, furthermore, were abandoning their corsets. "The men won't dance with you if you wear a corset," they were quoted as saying.
The current mode in dancing created still more consternation. Not the romantic violin but the barbaric saxophone now dominated the orchestra, and to its passionate crooning and wailing the fox-trotters moved in what the editor of the Hobart College Herald disgustedly called a "syncopated embrace." No longer did even an inch of space separate them; they danced as if glued together, body to body, cheek to cheek. Cried the Catholic Telegraph of Cincinnati in righteous indignation, "The music is sensuous, the embracing of partners--the female only half dressed--is absolutely indecent; and the motions--they are such as may not be described, with any respect for propriety, in a family newspaper. Suffice it to say that there are certain houses appropriate for such dances; but those houses have been closed by law."
Supposedly "nice" girls were smoking cigarettes--openly and defiantly, if often rather awkwardly and self-consciously. They were drinking-somewhat less openly but often all too efficaciously. There were stories of daughters of the most exemplary parents getting drunk--"blotto," as their companions cheerfully put it--on the contents of the hip-flasks of the new prohibition regime, and going out joyriding with men at four in the morning. And worst of all, even at well-regulated dances they were said to retire where the eye of the most sharp-sighted chaperon could not follow, and in darkened rooms or in parked cars to engage in the unspeakable practice of petting and necking.
It was not until F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had hardly graduated from Princeton and ought to know what his generation was doing, brought out This Side of Paradise in April, 1920, that fathers and mothers realized fully what was afoot and how long it had been going on. Apparently the "petting party" had been current as early as 1916, and was now widely established as an indoor sport. "None of the Victorian mothers - and most of the mothers were Victorian-had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed," wrote Mr. Fitzgerald. " . . Amory saw girls doing things that even in his memory would have been impossible: eating three-o'clock, after- dance suppers in impossible cafes, talking of every side of life with an air half of earnestness, half of mockery, yet with a furtive excitement that Amory considered stood for a real moral let-down. But he never realized how widespread it was until he saw the cities between New York and Chicago as one vast juvenile intrigue." The book caused a shudder to run down the national spine; did not Mr. Fitzgerald represent one of his well- nurtured heroines as brazenly confessing, "I've kissed dozens of men. I suppose I'll kiss dozens more"; and another heroine as saying to a young man (to a young man!), "Oh, just one person in fifty has any glimmer of what sex is. I'm hipped on Freud and all that, but it's rotten that every bit of real love in the world is ninety-nine per cent passion and one little soupcon of jealousy"?
It was incredible. It was abominable. What did it all mean? Was every decent standard being thrown over? Mothers read the scarlet words and wondered if they themselves "had any idea how often their daughters were accustomed to be kissed." . . . But no, this must be an exaggerated account of the misconduct of some especially depraved group. Nice girls couldn't behave like that and talk openly about passion. But in due course other books appeared to substantiate the findings of Mr. Fitzgerald: Dancers in the Dark, The Plastic Age, Flaming Youth. Magazine articles and newspapers reiterated the scandal. To be sure, there were plenty of communities where nice girls did not, in actual fact, "behave like that"; and even in the more sophisticated urban centers there were plenty of girls who did not. Nevertheless, there was enough fire beneath the smoke of these sensational revelations to make the Problem of the Younger Generation a topic of anxious discussion from coast to coast.
The forces of morality rallied to the attack. Dr. Francis E. Clark, the founder and president of the Christian Endeavor Society, declared that the modern "indecent dance" was "an offense against womanly purity, the very fountainhead of our family and civil life." The new style of dancing was denounced in religious journals as "impure, polluting, corrupting, debasing, destroying spirituality, increasing carnality," and the mothers and sisters and church members of the land were called upon to admonish and instruct and raise the spiritual tone of these dreadful young people. President Murphy of the University of Florida cried out with true Southern warmth, "The low-cut gowns, the rolled hose and short skirts are born of the Devil and his angels, and are carrying the present and future generations to chaos and destruction." A group of Episcopal church-women in New York, speaking with the authority of wealth and social position (for they included Mrs. J. Pierpont Morgan, Mrs. Borden Harriman, Mrs. Henry Phipps, Mrs. James Roosevelt, and Mrs. E. H. Harriman), proposed an organization to discourage fashions involving an "excess of nudity" and "improper ways of dancing." The Y W. C. A. conducted a national campaign against immodest dress among high-school girls, supplying newspapers with printed matter carrying headlines such as "Working Girls Responsive to Modesty Appeal" and "High Heels Losing Ground Even in France." In Philadelphia a Dress Reform Committee of prominent citizens sent a questionnaire to over a thousand clergymen to ask them what would be their idea of a proper dress, and although the gentlemen of the cloth showed a distressing variety of opinion, the committee proceeded to design a "moral gown" which was endorsed by ministers of fifteen denominations. The distinguishing characteristics of this moral gown were that it was very loose-fitting, that the sleeves reached just below the elbows, and that the hem came within seven and a half inches of the floor.
Not content with example and reproof, legislators in several states introduced bills to reform feminine dress once and for all. The New York American reported in 1921 that a bill was pending in Utah providing fine and imprisonment for those who wore on the streets "skirts higher than three inches above the ankle." A bill was laid before the Virginia legislature which would forbid any woman from wearing shirtwaists or evening gowns which displayed "more than three inches of her throat." In Ohio the proposed limit of decolletage was two inches; the bill introduced in the Ohio legislature aimed also to prevent the sale of any "garment which unduly displays or accentuates the lines of the female figure," and to prohibit any "female over fourteen years of age" from wearing "a skirt which does not reach to that part of the foot known as the instep."
Meanwhile innumerable families were torn with dissension over cigarettes and gin and all-night automobile rides. Fathers and mothers lay awake asking themselves whether their children were not utterly lost; sons and daughters evaded questions, lied miserably and unhappily, or flared up to reply rudely that at least they were not dirty-minded hypocrites, that they saw no harm in what they were doing and proposed to go right on doing it. From those liberal clergymen and teachers who prided themselves on keeping step with all that was new came a chorus of reassurance: these young people were at least franker and more honest than their elders had been; having experimented for themselves, would they not soon find out which standards were outworn and which represented the accumulated moral wisdom of the race? Hearing such hopeful words, many good people took heart again. Perhaps this flare-up of youthful passion was a flash in the pan, after all. Perhaps in another year or two the boys and girls would come to their senses and everything would be all right again.
They were wrong, however. For the revolt of the younger generation was only the beginning of a revolution in manners and morals that was already beginning to affect men and women of every age in every part of the country.
A number of forces were working together and interacting upon one another to make this revolution inevitable.
First of all was the state of mind brought about by the war and its conclusion. A whole generation had been infected by the eat-drink-and-be- merry-for-tomorrow-we-die spirit which accompanied the departure of the soldiers to the training camps and the fighting front. There had been an epidemic not only of abrupt war marriages, but of less conventional liaisons. In France, two million men had found themselves very close to filth and annihilation and very far from the American moral code and its defenders; prostitution had followed the flag and willing mademoiselles from Armentieres had been plentiful; American girls sent over as nurses and war workers had come under the influence of continental manners and standards without being subject to the rigid protections thrown about their continental sisters of the respectable classes; and there had been a very widespread and very natural breakdown of traditional restraints and reticences and taboos. It was impossible for this generation to return unchanged when the ordeal was over. Some of them had acquired under the pressure of war-time conditions a new code which seemed to them quite defensible; millions of them had been provided with an emotional stimulant from which it was not easy to taper off. Their torn nerves craved the anodynes of speed, excitement, and passion. They found themselves expected to settle down into the humdrum routine of American life as if nothing had happened, to accept the moral dicta of elders who seemed to them still to be living in a Pollyanna land of rosy ideals which the war had killed for them. They couldn't do it, and they very disrespectfully said so.
"The older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us," wrote one of them (John F. Carter in the Atlantic Monthly, September, 1920), expressing accurately the sentiments of innumerable contemporaries. "They give us this thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up; and then they are surprised that we don't accept it with the same attitude of pretty, decorous enthusiasm with which they received it, way back in the 'eighties."
The middle generation was not so immediately affected by the war neurosis. They had had time enough, before 1917, to build up habits of conformity not easily broken down. But they, too, as the let-down of 1919 followed the war, found themselves restless and discontented, in a mood to question everything that had once seemed to them true and worthy and of good report. They too had spent themselves and wanted a good time. They saw their juniors exploring the approaches to the forbidden land of sex, and presently they began to play with the idea of doing a little experimenting of their own. The same disillusion which had defeated Woodrow Wilson and had caused strikes and riots and the Big Red Scare furnished a culture in which the germs of the new freedom could grow and multiply.
The revolution was accelerated also by the growing independence of the American woman. She won the suffrage in 1920. She seemed, it is true, to be very little interested in it once she had it; she voted, but mostly as the unregenerate men about her did, despite the efforts of women's clubs and the League of Women Voters to awaken her to womanhood's civic opportunity; feminine candidates for office were few, and some of them-such as Governor Ma Ferguson of Texas-scarcely seemed to represent the starry-eyed spiritual influence which, it had been promised, would presently ennoble public life. Few of the younger women could rouse themselves to even a passing interest in politics: to them it was a sordid and futile business, without flavor and without hope. Nevertheless, the winning of the suffrage had its effect. It consolidated woman's position as man's equal.
Even more marked was the effect of woman's growing independence of the drudgeries of housekeeping. Smaller houses were being built, and they were easier to look after. Families were moving into apartments, and these made even less claim upon the housekeeper's time and energy. Women were learning how to make lighter work of the preparation of meals. Sales of canned foods were growing, the number of delicatessen stores had increased three times as fast as the population during the decade 1910-20, the output of bakeries increased by 60 per cent during the decade 1914-24. Much of what had once been housework was now either moving out of the home entirely or being simplified by machinery. The use of commercial laundries, for instance, increased by 57 per cent between 1914 and 1924. Electric washing-machines and electric irons were coming to the aid of those who still did their washing at home; the manager of the local electric power company at "Middletown," a typical small American city, estimated in 1924 that nearly 90 per cent of the homes in the city already had electric irons. The housewife was learning to telephone her shopping orders, to get her clothes ready-made and spare herself the rigors of dress-making, to buy a vacuum cleaner and emulate the lovely carefree girls in the magazine advertisements who banished dust with such delicate fingers. Women were slowly becoming emancipated from routine to "live their own lives."
And what were these "own lives" of theirs to be like? Well, for one thing, they could take jobs. Up to this time girls of the middle classes who had wanted to "do something" had been largely restricted to school- teaching, social-service work, nursing, stenography, and clerical work in business houses. But now they poured out of the schools and colleges into all manner of new occupations. They besieged the offices of publishers and advertisers; they went into tea-room management until there threatened to be more purveyors than consumers of chicken patties and cinnamon toast; they sold antiques, sold real estate, opened smart little shops, and finally invaded the department stores. In 1920 the department store was in the mind of the average college girl a rather bourgeois institution which employed "poor shop girls"; by the end of the decade college girls were standing in line for openings in the misses' sports- wear department and even selling behind the counter in the hope that some day fortune might smile upon them and make them buyers or stylists. Small-town girls who once would have been contented to stay in Sauk Center all their days were now borrowing from father to go to New York or Chicago to seek their fortunes-in Best's or Macy's or Marshall Field's. Married women who were encumbered with children and could not seek jobs consoled themselves with the thought that homemaking and child- rearing were really "professions," after all. No topic was so furiously discussed at luncheon tables from one end of the country to the other as the question whether the married woman should take a job, and whether the mother had a right to. And as for the unmarried woman, she no longer had to explain why she worked in a shop or an office; it was idleness, nowadays, that had to be defended.
With the job-or at least the sense that the job was a possibility-came a feeling of comparative economic independence. With the feeling of economic independence came a slackening of husbandly and parental authority. Maiden aunts and unmarried daughters were leaving the shelter of the family roof to install themselves in kitchenette apartments of their own. For city-dwellers the home was steadily becoming less of a shrine, more of a dormitory-a place of casual shelter where one stopped overnight on the way from the restaurant and the movie theater to the office. Yet even the job did not provide the American woman with that complete satisfaction which the management of a mechanized home no longer furnished. She still had energies and emotions to burn; she was ready for the revolution.
Like all revolutions, this one was stimulated by foreign propaganda. It came, however, not from Moscow, but from Vienna. Sigmund Freud had published his first book on psychoanalysis at the end of the nineteenth century, and he and Jung had lectured to American psychologists as early as 1909, but it was not until after the war that the Freudian gospel began to circulate to a marked extent among the American lay public. The one great intellectual force which had not suffered disrepute as a result of the war was science; the more-or-less educated public was now absorbing a quantity of popularized information about biology and anthropology which gave a general impression that men and women were merely animals of a rather intricate variety, and that moral codes had no universal validity and were often based on curious superstitions. A fertile ground was ready for the seeds of Freudianism, and presently one began to hear even from the lips of flappers that "science taught" new and disturbing things about sex. Sex, it appeared, was the central and pervasive force which moved mankind. Almost every human motive was attributable to it: if you were patriotic or liked the violin, you were in the grip of sex-in a sublimated form. The first requirement of mental health was to have an uninhibited sex life. If you would be well and happy, you must obey your libido. Such was the Freudian gospel as it imbedded itself in the American mind after being filtered through the successive minds of interpreters and popularizers and guileless readers and people who had heard guileless readers talk about it. New words and phrases began to be bandied about the cocktail-tray and the Mah Jong table-inferiority complex, sadism, masochism, Oedipus complex. Intellectual ladies went to Europe to be analyzed; analysts plied their new trade in American cities, conscientiously transferring the affections of their fair patients to themselves; and clergymen who preached about the virtue of self-control were reminded by outspoken critics that self control was out-of-date and really dangerous.
The principal remaining forces which accelerated the revolution in manners and morals were all 100 per cent American. They were prohibition, the automobile, the confession and sex magazines, and the movies.
When the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibition seemed, as we have already noted, to have an almost united country behind it. Evasion of the law began immediately, however, and strenuous and sincere opposition to it-especially in the large cities of the North and East-quickly gathered force. The results were the bootlegger, the speakeasy, and a spirit of deliberate revolt which in many communities made drinking "the thing to do." From these facts in turn flowed further results: the increased popularity of distilled as against fermented liquors, the use of the hip- flask, the cocktail party, and the general transformation of drinking from a masculine prerogative to one shared by both sexes together. The old-time saloon had been overwhelmingly masculine; the speakeasy usually catered to both men and women. As Elmer Davis put it, "Me old days when father spent his evenings at Cassidy's bar with the rest of the boys are gone, and probably gone forever; Cassidy may still be in business at the old stand and father may still go down there of evenings, but since prohibition mother goes down with him." Under the new regime not only the drinks were mixed, but the company as well.
Meanwhile a new sort of freedom was being made possible by the enormous increase in the use of the automobile, and particularly of the closed car. (In 1919 hardly more than 10 per cent of the cars produced in the United States were closed; by 1924 the percentage had jumped to 43, by 1927 it had reached 82.8.) The automobile offered an almost universally available means of escaping temporarily from the supervision of parents and chaperons, or from the influence of neighborhood opinion. Boys and girls now thought nothing, as the Lynds pointed out in Middletown, of jumping into a car and driving off at a moment's notice-without asking anybody's permission-to a dance in another town twenty miles away, where they were strangers and enjoyed a freedom impossible among their neighbors. The closed car, moreover, was in effect a room protected from the weather which could be occupied at any time of the day or night and could be moved at will into a darkened byway or a country lane. The Lynds quoted the judge of the juvenile court in "Middletown" as declaring that the automobile had become a "house of prostitution on wheels," and cited the fact that of thirty girls brought before his court in a year on charges of sex crimes, for whom the place where the offense had occurred was recorded, nineteen were listed as having committed it in an automobile.
Finally, as the revolution began, its influence fertilized a bumper crop of sex magazines, confession magazines, and lurid motion pictures, and these in turn had their effect on a class of readers and movie-goers who had never heard and never would hear of Freud and the libido. The publishers of the sex adventure magazines, offering stories with such titles as "What I Told My Daughter the Night Before Her Marriage," "Indolent Kisses," and "Watch Your Step-Ins," learned to a nicety the gentle art of arousing the reader without arousing the censor. The publishers of the confession magazines, while always instructing their authors to provide a moral ending and to utter pious sentiments, concentrated on the description of what they euphemistically called "missteps." Most of their fiction was faked to order by hack writers who could write one day "The Confessions of a Chorus Girl" and the next day recount, again in the first person, the temptations which made it easy for the taxi driver to go wrong. Both classes of magazines became astonishingly numerous and successful. Bernarr Macfadden's True-Story, launched as late as 1919, had over 300,000 readers by 1923; 848,000 by 1924; over a million and a half by 1925; and almost two million by 1926-a record of rapid growth probably unparalleled in magazine publishing.
Crowding the news stands along with the sex and confession magazines were motion-picture magazines which depicted "seven movie kisses" with such captions as "Do you recognize your little friend, Mae Busch? She's had lots of kisses, but she never seems to grow blas�. At least you'll agree that she's giving a good imitation of a person enjoying this one." The movies themselves, drawing millions to their doors every day and every night, played incessantly upon the same lucrative theme. The producers of one picture advertised "brilliant men, beautiful jazz babies, champagne baths, midnight revels, petting parties in the purple dawn, all ending in one terrific smashing climax that makes you gasp"; the venders of another promised "neckers, petters, white kisses, red kisses, pleasure-mad daughters, sensation-craving mothers .... the truth-bold, naked, sensational." Seldom did the films offer as much as these advertisements promised, but there was enough in some of them to cause a sixteen-year-old girl (quoted by Alice Miller Mitchell) to testify, "Those pictures with hot love-making in them, they make girls and boys sitting together want to get up and walk out, go off somewhere, you know. Once I walked out with a boy before the picture was even over. We took a ride. But my friend, she all the time had to get up and go out with her boyfriend."
A storm of criticism from church organizations led the motion-picture producers, early in the decade, to install Will H. Hays, President Harding's Postmaster-General, as their arbiter of morals and of taste, and Mr. Hays promised that all would be well. "This industry must have," said he before the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, "toward that sacred thing, the mind of a child, toward that clean virgin thing, that unmarked slate, the same responsibility, the same care about the impressions made upon it, that the best clergyman or the most inspired teacher of youth would have." The result of Mr. Hays's labors in behalf of the unmarked slate was to make the moral ending as obligatory as in the confession magazines, to smear over sexy pictures with pious platitudes, and to blacklist for motion-picture production many a fine novel and play which, because of its very honesty, might be construed as seriously or intelligently questioning the traditional sex ethics of the small town. Mr. Hays, being something of a genius, managed to keep the churchmen at bay. Whenever the threats of censorship began to become ominous he would promulgate a new series of moral commandments for the producers to follow. Yet of the practical effects of his supervision it is perhaps enough to say that the quotations given above all date from the period of his dictatorship. Giving lip-service to the old code, the movies diligently and with consummate vulgarity publicized the new.
Each of these diverse influences-the post-war disillusion, the new status of women, the Freudian gospel, the automobile, prohibition, the sex and confession magazines, and the movies-had its part in bringing about the revolution. Each of them, as an influence, was played upon by all the others; none of them could alone have changed to any great degree the folkways of America; together their force was irresistible.
The most conspicuous sign of what was taking place was the immense change in women's dress and appearance.
In Professor Paul H. Nystrom's Economics of Fashion, the trend of skirt- length during the Post-war Decade is ingeniously shown by the sort of graph with which business analysts delight to compute the ebb and flow of car-loadings or of stock averages. The basis of this graph is a series of measurements of fashion-plates in the Delineator; the statistician painstakingly measured the relation, from month to month, of the height of the skirt hem above the ground to the total height of the figure, and plotted his curve accordingly. This very unusual graph shows that in 1919 the average distance of the hem above the ground was about 10 per cent of the woman's height-or to put it in another way, about six or seven inches. In 1920 it curved upward from 10 to about 20 per cent. During the next three years it gradually dipped to 10 per cent again, reaching its low point in 1923. In 1924, however, it rose once more to between 15 and 20 per cent, in 1925 to more than 20 per cent; and the curve continued steadily upward until by 1927 it had passed the 25 per cent mark-in other words, until the skirt had reached the knee. There it remained until late in 1929.
This graph, as Professor Nystrom explains, does not accurately indicate what really happened, for it represents for any given year or month, not the average length of skirts actually worn, but the length of the skirt which the arbiters of fashion, not uninfluenced by the manufacturers of dress goods, expected and wanted women to wear. In actual fact, the dip between 1921 and 1924 was very slight. Paris dressmakers predicted the return of longer skirts, the American stylists and manufacturers followed their lead, the stores bought the longer skirts and tried to sell them, but women kept on buying the shortest skirts they could find. During the fall of 1923 and the spring of 1924, manufacturers were deluged with complaints from retailers that skirts would have to be shorter. Shorter they finally were, and still shorter. The knee-length dress proved to be exactly what women wanted. The unlucky manufacturers made valiant efforts to change the fashion. Despite all they could do, however, the knee-length skirt remained standard until the decade was approaching its end.
With the short skirt went an extraordinary change in the weight and material and amount of women's clothing. The boyishly slender figure became the aim of every woman's ambition, and the corset was so far abandoned that even in so short a period as the three years from 1924 to 1927 the combined sales of corsets and brassieres in the department stores of the Cleveland Federal Reserve District fell off 11 per cent. Silk or rayon stockings and underwear supplanted cotton, to the distress of cotton manufacturers and the delight of rayon manufacturers; the production of rayon in American plants, which in 1920 had been only eight million pounds, had by 1925 reached fifty-three million pounds. The flesh- colored stocking became as standard as the short skirt. Petticoats almost vanished from the American scene; in fact, the tendency of women to drop off one layer of clothing after another became so pronounced that in 1928 the Journal of Commerce estimated that in 15 years the amount of material required for a woman's complete costume (exclusive of her stockings) had declined from 19'/4 yards to 7 yards. All she could now be induced to wear, it seemed, was an over blouse (2 yards), a skirt (2'/4 yards), vest or shirt (3/4), knickers (2), and stockings-and all of them were made of silk or rayon! This latter statement, it is true, was a slight exaggeration; but a survey published in 1926 by the National Retail Dry Goods Association, on the basis of data from department stores all over the country, showed that only 33 per cent of the women's underwear sold was made of cotton, whereas 36 per cent was made of rayon, and 31 per cent of silk. No longer were silk stockings the mark of the rich; as the wife of a workingman with a total family income of $1,638 a year told the authors of Middletown, "No girl can wear cotton stockings to high school. Even in winter my children wear silk stockings with lisle or imitations underneath."
Not content with the freedom of short and skimpy clothes, women sought, too, the freedom of short hair. During the early years of the decade the bobbed head-which in 1918, as you may recall, had been regarded by the proprietor of the Palm Garden in New York as a sign of radicalism-became increasingly frequent among young girls, chiefly on the ground of convenience. In May, 1922, the American Hairdresser predicted that the bob, which persisted in being popular, "will probably last through the summer, anyway." It not only did this, it so increased in popularity that by 1924 the same journal was forced to feature bobbed styles and give its subscribers instructions in the new art, and was reporting the progress of a lively battle between the professional hairdressers and the barbers for the cream of this booming business. The ladies' hairdressers very naturally objected to women going to barbers' shops; the barbers, on the other hand, were trying to force legislation in various states which would forbid the "hairdressing profession" to cut hair unless they were licensed as barbers. Said the Hairdresser, putting the matter on the loftiest basis, "The effort to bring women to barber shops for haircutting is against the best interests of the public, the free and easy atmosphere often prevailing in barber shops being unsuitable to the high standard of American womanhood." But all that American womanhood appeared to insist upon was the best possible shingle. In the latter years of the decade bobbed hair became almost universal among girls in their twenties, very common among women in their thirties and forties, and by no means rare among women of sixty; and for a brief period the hair was not only bobbed, but in most cases cropped close to the head like a man's. Women universally adopted the small cloche hat which fitted tightly on the bobbed head, and the manufacturer of milliner's materials joined the hair-net manufacturer, the hair-pin manufacturer, and the cotton goods and woolen goods and corset manufacturers, among the ranks of depressed industries.
For another industry, however, the decade brought new and enormous profits. The manufacturers of cosmetics and the proprietors of beauty shops had less than nothing to complain of. The vogue of rouge and lipstick, which in 1920 had so alarmed the parents of the younger generation, spread swiftly to the remotest village. Women who in 1920 would have thought the use of paint immoral were soon applying it regularly as a matter of course and making no effort to disguise the fact; beauty shops had sprung up on every street to give "facials," to apply pomade and astringents, to make war against the wrinkles and sagging chins of age, to pluck and trim and color the eyebrows, and otherwise to enhance and restore the bloom of youth; and a strange new form of surgery, "face-lifting," took its place among the applied sciences of the day. Back in 1917, according to Frances Fisher Dubuc, only two persons in the beauty culture business had paid an income tax; by 1927 there were 18,000 firms and individuals in this field listed as income- tax payers. The "beautician" had arrived.
As for the total amount of money spent by American women on cosmetics and beauty culture by the end of the decade, we may probably accept as conservative the prodigious figure of three-quarters of a billion dollars set by Professor Paul H. Nystrom in 1930; other estimates, indeed, ran as high as two billion. Mrs.. Christine Frederick tabulated in 1929 some other equally staggering figures: for every adult woman in the country there were being sold annually over a pound of face powder and no less than eight rouge compacts; there were 2,500 brands of perfume on the market and 1,500 face creams; and if all the lipsticks sold in a year in the United States were placed end to end, they would reach from New York to Reno-which to some would seem an altogether logical destination.
Perhaps the readiest way of measuring the change in the public attitude toward cosmetics is to compare the advertisements in a conservative periodical at the beginning of the decade with those at its end. Although the June, 1919, issue of the Ladies' Home Journal contained four advertisements which listed rouge among other products, only one of them commented on its inclusion, and this referred to its rouge as one that was "imperceptible if properly applied." In those days the woman who used rouge-at least in the circles in which the Journal was read-wished to disguise the fact. (Advertisements of talc, in 1919, commonly dis- played a mother leaning affectionately over a bouncing baby.) In the June, 1929, issue, exactly ten years later, the Journal permitted a lipstick to be advertised with the comment, "It's comforting to know that the alluring note of scarlet will stay with you for hours." (Incidentally, the examination of those two magazines offers another contrast: in 1919 the Listerine advertisement said simply, "The prompt application of Listerine may prevent a minor accident from becoming a major infection," whereas in 1929 it began a tragic rhapsody with the words, "Spring! for everyone but her . . .").
These changes in fashion-the short skirt, the boyish form, the straight, long-waisted dresses, the frank use of paint-were signs of a real change in the American feminine ideal (as well, perhaps, as in men's idea of what was the feminine ideal). Women were bent on freedom-freedom to work and to play without the trammels that had bound them heretofore to lives of comparative inactivity. But what they sought was not the freedom from man and his desires which had put the suffragists of an earlier day into hard straw hats and mannish suits and low-heeled shoes. The woman of the nineteen-twenties wanted to be able to allure man even on the golf links and in the office; the little flapper who shingled her hair and wore a manageable little hat and put on knickerbockers for the weekends would not be parted from her silk stockings and her high-heeled shoes. Nor was the post-war feminine ideal one of fruitful maturity or ripened wisdom or practiced grace. On the contrary: the quest of slenderness, the flattening of the breasts, the vogue of short skirts (even when short skirts still suggested the appearance of a little girl), the juvenile effect of the long waist-all were signs that, consciously or unconsciously, the women of this decade worshiped not merely youth, but unripened youth. They wanted to be-or thought men wanted them to be-men's casual and light-hearted companions; not broad-hipped mothers of the race, but irresponsible play- mates. Youth was their pattern, but not youthful innocence: the adolescent whom they imitated was a hard-boiled adolescent, who thought not in terms of romantic love, but in terms of sex, and who made herself desirable not by that sly art which conceals art, but frankly and openly. 1n effect, the woman of the Post-war Decade said to man, "You are tired and disillusioned, you do not want the cares of a family or the companionship of mature wisdom, you want exciting play, you want the thrills of sex without their fruition, and I will give them to you." And to herself she added, "But I will be free."
One indication of the revolution in manners which her headlong pursuit of freedom brought about was her rapid acceptance of the cigarette. Within a very few years millions of American women of all ages followed the lead of the flappers of 1920 and took up smoking. Custom still generally frowned upon their doing it on the street or in the office, and in the evangelical hinterlands the old taboo died hard; but in restaurants, at dinner parties and dances, in theater lobbies, and in a hundred other places they made the air blue. Here again the trend in advertising measured the trend in public opinion. At the beginning of the decade advertisers realized that it would have been suicidal to portray a woman smoking; within a few years, however, they ventured pictures of pretty girls imploring men to blow some of the smoke their way; and by the end of the decade billboards boldly displayed a smart-looking woman cigarette in hand, and in some of the magazines, despite floods of protests from rural readers, tobacco manufacturers were announcing that "now women may enjoy a companionable smoke with their husbands and brothers." In the ten years between 1918 and 1928 the total production of cigarettes in the United States more than doubled. Part of this increase was doubtless due to the death of the one-time masculine prejudice against the cigarette as unmanly, for it was accompanied by somewhat of a decrease in the production of cigars and smoking tobacco, as well as-mercifully-of chewing tobacco. Part of it was attributable to the fact that the convenience of the cigarette made the masculine smoker consume more tobacco than in the days when he preferred a cigar or a pipe. But the increase could never have been so large had it not been for the women who now strewed the dinner table with their ashes, snatched a puff between the acts, invaded the masculine sanctity of the club car, and forced department stores to place ornamental ash-trays between the chairs in their women's shoe departments. A formidable barrier between the sexes had broken down. The custom of separating them after formal dinners, for example, still lingered, but as an empty rite. Hosts who laid in a stock of cigars for their male guests often found them untouched; the men in the dining-room were smoking the very same brands of cigarettes that the ladies consumed in the living-room.
Of far greater social significance, however, was the fact that men and women were drinking together. Among well-to-do people the serving of cocktails before dinner became almost socially obligatory. Mixed parties swarmed up to the curtained grills of speakeasies and uttered the mystic password, and girls along with men stood at the speakeasy bar with one foot on the old brass rail. The late afternoon cocktail party became a new American institution. When dances were held in hotels, the curious and rather unsavory custom grew up of hiring hotel rooms where reliable drinks could be served in suitable privacy; guests of both sexes lounged on the beds and tossed off mixtures of high potency. As houses and apartments became smaller, the country club became the social center of the small city, the suburb, and the summer resort; and to its pretentious clubhouse, every Saturday night, drove men and women (after a round of cocktails at somebody's house) for the weekly dinner dance. Bottles of White Rock and of ginger ale decked the tables, out of capacious masculine hip pockets came flasks of gin (once the despised and rejected of bartenders, now the most popular of all liquors), and women who a few years before would have gasped at the thought that they would ever be "under the influence of alcohol" found themselves matching the men drink for drink and enjoying the uproarious release. The next day gossip would report that the reason Mrs. So-and-so disappeared from the party at eleven was because she had had too many cocktails and had been led to the dressing-room to be sick, or that somebody would have to meet the club's levy for breakage, or that Mrs. Such-and-such really oughtn't to drink so much because three cocktails made her throw bread about the table. A passing scandal would be created by a dance at which substantial married men amused themselves by tripping up waiters, or young people bent on petting parties drove right out on the golf-links and made wheel-tracks on the eighteenth green.
Such incidents were of course exceptional and in many communities they never occurred. It was altogether probable, though the professional wets denied it, that prohibition succeeded in reducing the total amount of drinking in the country as a whole and in reducing it decidedly among the workingmen of the industrial districts. The majority of experienced college administrators agreed-rather to the annoyance of some of their undergraduates-that there was less drinking among men students than there had been before prohibition and that drinking among girl students, at least while they were in residence, hardly offered a formidable problem. Yet the fact remained that among the prosperous classes which set the standards of national social behavior, alcohol flowed more freely than ever before and lubricated an unprecedented informality-to say the least-of manners.
It lubricated, too, a new outspokenness between men and women. Thanks to the spread of scientific skepticism and especially to Sigmund Freud, the dogmas of the conservative moralists were losing force and the dogma that salvation lay in facing the facts of sex was gaining. An upheaval in values was taking place. Modesty, reticence, and chivalry were going out of style; women no longer wanted to be "ladylike" or could appeal to their daughters to be "wholesome"; it was too widely suspected that the old-fashioned lady had been a sham and that the "wholesome" girl was merely inhibiting a nasty mind and would come to no good end. "Victorian" and "Puritan" were becoming terms of opprobrium: up-to-date people thought of Victorians as old ladies with bustles and inhibitions, and of Puritans as blue-nosed, ranting spoilsports. It was better to be modern-everybody wanted to be modern-and sophisticated, and smart, to smash the conventions and to be devastatingly frank. And with a cocktail glass in one's hand it was easy at least to be frank.
Listen with a detached ear to a modern conversation," wrote Mary Agnes Hamilton in 1927, "and you will be struck, first, by the restriction of the vocabulary, and second, by the high proportion in that vocabulary of words such as, in the older jargon, `no lady could use.' " With the taste for strong liquors went a taste for strong language. To one's lovely dinner partner, the inevitable antithesis for "grand" and "swell" had become "lousy." An unexpected "damn" or "hell" uttered on the New York stage was no longer a signal for the sudden sharp laughter of shocked surprise; such words were becoming the commonplace of everyday talk. The barroom anecdote of the decade before now went the rounds of aristocratic bridge tables. Every one wanted to be unshockable; it was delightful to be considered a little shocking; and so the competition in boldness of talk went on until for a time, as Mrs. Hamilton put it, a conversation in polite circles was like a room decorated entirely in scarlet- the result was over-emphasis, stridency, and eventual boredom.
Along with the new frankness in conversation went a new frankness in books and the theater. Consider, for example, the themes of a handful of the best plays produced in New York during the decade: What Price Glory? which represented the amorous marines interlarding their talk with epithets new to the stage; The Road to Rome, the prime comic touch of which was the desire of a Roman matron to be despoiled by the Carthaginians; Strange Interlude, in which a wife who found there was insanity in her husband's family but wanted to give him a child decided to have the child by an attractive young doctor, instead of by her husband, and forthwith fell in love with the doctor; Strictly Dishonorable, in which a charming young girl walked blithely and open eyed into an affair of a night with an opera-singer; and The Captive, which revealed to thousands of innocents the fact that the world contained such a phenomenon as homosexuality. None of these plays could have been tolerated even in New York before the Post-war Decade; all of them in the nineteen-twenties were not merely popular, but genuinely admired by intelligent audiences. The effect of some of them upon these audiences is suggested by the story of the sedate old lady who, after two acts of What Price Glory? reprimanded her grandson with a "God damn it, Johnny, sit down!"
The same thing was true of the novels of the decade; one after another, from Jurgen and Dark Laughter through the tales of Michael Arlen to An American Tragedy and The Sun Also Rises and The Well of Loneliness and Point Counter Point, they dealt with sex with an openness or a cynicism or an unmoral objectivity new to the English-speaking world.
Bitterly the defenders of the Puritan code tried to stem the tide, but it was too strong for them. They banned Jurgen--and made a best seller of it and a public reputation for its author. They dragged Mary Ware Dennett into court for distributing a pamphlet for children which explained some of the mysteries of sex-only to have her upheld by a liberal judge and endorsed by intelligent public opinion. In Boston, where they were backed by an alliance between stubborn Puritanism and Roman Catholicism, they banned books wholesale, forbade the stage presentation of Strange Interlude, and secured the conviction of a bookseller for selling Lady Chatterley's Lover--only to find that the intellectuals of the whole country were laughing at them and that ultimately they were forced to allow the publication of books which they would have moved to ban ten years before. Despite all that they could do, the taste of the country demanded a new sort of reading matter.
Early in the decade a distinguished essayist wrote an article in which she contended that the physical processes of childbirth were humiliating to many women. She showed it to the editor of one of the best magazines, and he and she agreed that it should not be printed: too many readers would be repelled by the subject matter and horrified by the thesis. Only a few years later, in 1927, the editor recalled this manuscript and asked if he might see it again. He saw it-and wondered why it had ever been disqualified. Already such frankness seemed quite natural and permissible. The article was duly published, and caused only the mildest of sensations.
If in 1918 the editors of a reputable magazine had accepted a story in which one gangster said to another, "For Christ's sake, Joe, give her the gas. Some lousy bastard has killed Eddie," they would have whipped out the blue pencil and changed the passage to something like "For the love of Mike, Joe, give her the gas. Some dirty skunk has killed Eddie." In 1929 that sentence appeared in a story accepted by a magazine of the most unblemished standing, and was printed without alteration. A few readers objected, but not many. Times had changed. Even in the great popular periodicals with huge circulations and a considerable following in the strongholds of rural Methodism the change in standards was apparent. Said a short-story writer in the late nineteen-twenties, "I used to write for magazines like the Saturday Evening Post and the Pictorial Review when I had a nice innocuous tale to tell and wanted the money, and for magazines like Harper's and Scribner's when I wanted to write something searching and honest. Now I find I can sell the honest story to the big popular magazines too."
With the change in manners went an inevitable change in morals. Boys and girls were becoming sophisticated about sex at an earlier age; it was symptomatic that when the authors of Middletown asked 241 boys and 315 girls of high-school age to mark as true or false, according to their opinion, the extreme statement, "Nine out of every ten boys and girls of high-school age have petting parties," almost precisely half of them marked it as true. How much actual intercourse there was among such young people it is of course impossible to say; but the lurid stories told by Judge Lindsay-of girls who carried contraceptives in their vanity cases, and of "Caroline," who told the judge that fifty-eight girls of her acquaintance had had one or more sex experiences without a single pregnancy resulting-were matched by the gossip current in many a town. Whether prostitution increased or decreased during the decade is likewise uncertain; but certain it is that the prostitute was faced for the first time with an amateur competition of formidable proportions.
As for the amount of outright infidelity among married couples, one is again without reliable data, the private relations of men and women being happily beyond the reach of the statistician. The divorce rate, however, continued its steady increase; for every 100 marriages there were 8.8 divorces in 1910, 13.4 divorces in 1920, and 16.5 divorces in 1928-almost one divorce for every six marriages. There was a corresponding decline in the amount of disgrace accompanying divorce. In the urban communities men and women who had been divorced were now socially accepted without question; indeed, there was often about the divorced person just enough of an air of unconventionality, just enough of a touch of scarlet, to be considered rather dashing and desirable. Many young women probably felt as did the New York girl who said, toward the end of the decade, that she was thinking of marrying Henry, although she didn't care very much for him, because even if they didn't get along she could get a divorce and "it would be much more exciting to be a divorcee than to be an old maid."
The petting party, which in the first years of the decade had been limited to youngsters in their teens and twenties, soon made its appearance among older men and women: when the gin-flask was passed about the hotel bedroom during a dance, or the musicians stilled their saxophones during the Saturday-night party at the country club, men of affairs and women with half-grown children had their little taste of raw sex. One began to hear of young girls, intelligent and well born, who had spent week-ends with men before marriage and had told their prospective husbands everything and had been not merely forgiven, but told that there was nothing to forgive; a little "experience," these men felt, was all to the good for any girl. Millions of people were moving toward acceptance of what a bon-vivant of earlier days had said was his idea of the proper state of morality--"A single standard, and that a low one."
It would be easy, of course, to match every one of these cases with contrasting cases of men and women who still thought and behaved at the end of the decade exactly as the president of the Epworth League would have wished. Two women who conducted newspaper columns of advice in affairs of the heart testified that the sort of problem which was worrying young America, to judge from their bulging correspondence, was not whether to tell the boyfriend about the illegitimate child, but whether it was proper to invite the boyfriend up on the porch if he hadn't yet come across with an invitation to the movies, or whether the cake at a pie social should be cut with a knife. In the hinterlands there was still plenty of old-fashioned sentimental thinking about sex, of the sort which expressed itself in the slogan of a federated women's club: "Men are God's trees, women are His flowers." There were frantic efforts to stay the tide of moral change by law, the most picturesque of these efforts being the ordinance actually passed in Norphelt, Arkansas, in 1925, which contained the following provisions:
"Section 1. Hereafter it shall be unlawful for any man and woman, male or female, to be guilty of committing the act of sexual intercourse between themselves at any place within the corporate limits of said town.
"Section 3. Section One of this ordinance shall not apply to married persons as between themselves, and their husband and wife, unless of a grossly improper and lascivious nature."
Nevertheless, there was an unmistakable and rapid trend away from the old American code toward a philosophy of sex relations and of marriage wholly new to the country: toward a feeling that the virtues of chastity and fidelity had been rated too highly, that there was some- thing to be said for what Mrs. Bertrand Russell defined as "the right, equally shared by men and women, to free participation in sex experience," that it was not necessary for girls to deny themselves this right before marriage or even for husbands and wives to do so after marriage. It was in acknowledgment of the spread of this feeling that Judge Lindsay proposed, in 1927, to establish "companionate marriage" on a legal basis. He wanted to legalize birth control (which, although still outlawed, was by this time generally practiced or believed in by married couples in all but the most ignorant classes) and to permit legal marriage to be terminated at any time in divorce by mutual consent, provided there were no children. His suggestion created great consternation and was widely and vigorously denounced; but the mere fact that it was seriously debated showed how the code of an earlier day had been shaken. The revolution in morals was in full swing.
A time of revolution, however, is an uneasy time to live in. It is easier to tear down a code than to put a new one in its place, and meanwhile there is bound to be more or less wear and tear and general unpleasant- ness. People who have been brought up to think that it is sinful for women to smoke or drink, and scandalous for sex to be discussed across the luncheon table, and unthinkable for a young girl to countenance strictly dishonorable attentions from a man, cannot all at once forget the admonitions of their childhood. It takes longer to hard-boil a man or a woman than an egg. Some of the apostles of the new freedom appeared to imagine that habits of thought could be changed overnight, and that if you only dragged the secrets of sex out into the daylight and let everyone do just as he pleased at the moment, society would at once enter upon a state of barbaric innocence like that of the remotest South Sea Islanders. But it couldn't be done. When you drag the secrets of sex out into the daylight, the first thing that the sons and daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Grundy do is to fall all over themselves in the effort to have a good look, and for a time they can think of nothing else. If you let every one do just as he pleases, he is as likely as not to begin by making a nuisance of himself. He may even shortly discover that making a nuisance of himself is not, after all, the recipe for lasting happiness. So it happened when the old codes were broken down in the Post- war Decade.
One of the most striking results of the revolution was a widely pervasive obsession with sex. To listen to the conversation of some of the sons and daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Grundy was to be reminded of the girl whose father said that she would talk about anything; in fact, she hardly ever talked about anything else. The public attitude toward any number of problems of the day revealed this obsession: to give a single example, the fashionable argument against women's colleges at this period had nothing to do with the curriculum or with the intellectual future of the woman graduate, but pointed out that living with girls for four years was likely to distort a woman's sex life. The public taste in reading matter revealed it: to say nothing of the sex magazines and the tabloids and the acres of newspaper space devoted to juicy scandals like that of Daddy Browning and his Peaches, it was significant that almost every one of the novelists who were ranked most highly by the post- war intellectuals was at outs with the censors, and that the Pulitzer Prize juries had a hard time meeting the requirement that the prize-winning novel should "present the wholesome atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and manhood," and finally had to alter the terms of the award, substituting "whole" for "wholesome" and omitting reference to "highest standards." There were few distinguished novels being written which one could identify with a "wholesome atmosphere" without making what the Senate would call interpretive reservations. Readers who considered themselves "modern-minded" did not want them: they wanted the philosophical promiscuity of Aldous Huxley's men and women, the perfumed indiscretions of Michael Arlen's degenerates, Ernest Hemingway's unflinching account of the fleeting amours of the drunken Brett Ashley, Anita Loos's comedy of two kept women and their gentlemen friends, Radclyffe Hall's study of homosexuality. Young men and women who a few years before would have been championing radical economic or political doctrines were championing the new morality and talking about it everywhere and thinking of it incessantly. Sex was in the limelight, and the Qrundy children could not turn their eyes away.
Another result of the revolution was that manners became not merely different, but-for a few years-unmannerly. It was no mere coincidence that during this decade hostesses-even at small parties-found that their guests couldn't be bothered to speak to them on arrival or departure; that "gatecrashing" at dances became an accepted practice; that thousands of men and women made a point of not getting to dinners within half an hour of the appointed time lest they seem insufficiently blase; that house parties of flappers and their wide-trousered swains left burning cigarettes on the mahogany tables, scattered ashes light-heartedly on the rugs, took the porch cushions out in the boats and left them there to be rained on, without apology; or that men and women who had had-as the old phrase went"advantages" and considered themselves highly civilized, absorbed a few cocktails and straightway turned a dinner party into a boisterous rout, forgetting that a general roughhouse was not precisely the sign of a return to the Greek idea of the good life. The old bars were down, no new ones had been built, and meanwhile the pigs were in the pasture. Some day, perhaps, the ten years which followed the war may aptly be known as the Decade of Bad Manners.
Nor was it easy to throw overboard the moral code and substitute another without confusion and distress. It was one thing to proclaim that married couples should be free to find sex adventure wherever they pleased and that marriage was something independent of such casual sport; it was quite another thing for a man or woman in whom the ideal of romantic marriage had been ingrained since early childhood to tolerate infidelities when they actually took place. Judge Lindsay told the story of a woman who had made up her mind that her husband might love whom he pleased; she would be modern and think none the less of him for it. But whenever she laid eyes on her rival she was physically sick. Her mind, she discovered, was hard-boiled only on the surface. That woman had many a counterpart during the revolution in morals; behind the grim statistics of divorce there was many a case of husband and wife experimenting with the new freedom and suddenly finding that there was dynamite in it which wrecked that mutual confidence and esteem without which marriage-even for the sake of their children could not be endured.
The new code had been born in disillusionment, and beneath all the bravado of its exponents and the talk about entering upon a new era the disillusionment persisted. If the decade was ill-mannered, it was also unhappy. With the old order of things had gone a set of values which had given richness and meaning to life, and substitute values were not easily found. If morality was dethroned, what was to take its place? Honor, said some of the prophets of the new day: "It doesn't matter much what you do so long as you're honest about it." A brave ideal-yet it did not wholly satisfy; it was too vague, too austere, too difficult to apply. If romantic love was dethroned, what was to take its place? Sex? But as Joseph Wood Krutch explained, "If love has come to be less often a sin, it has also come to be less often a supreme privilege." And as Walter Lippmann, in A Preface to Morals, added after quoting Mr. Krutch, "If you start with the belief that love is the pleasure of a moment, is it really surprising that it yields only a momentary pleasure?" The end of the pursuit of sex alone was emptiness and futility-the emptiness and futility to which Lady Brett Ashley and her friends in The Sun Also Rises were so tragically doomed.
There were not, to be sure, many Brett Ashleys in the United States during the Post-war Decade. Yet there were millions to whom in some degree came for a time the same disillusionment and with it the same unhappiness. They could not endure a life without values, and the only values they had been trained to understand were being undermined. Everything seemed meaningless and unimportant. Well, at least one could toss off a few drinks and get a kick out of physical passion and forget that the world was crumbling .... And so the saxophones wailed and the gin-flask went its rounds and the dancers made their treadmill circuit with half-closed eyes, and the outside world, so merciless and so insane, was shut away for a restless night ....
It takes time to build up a new code. Not until the decade was approaching its end did there appear signs that the revolutionists were once more learning to be at home in their world, to rid themselves of their obsession with sex, to adjust themselves emotionally to the change in conventions and standards, to live the freer and franker life of this new era gracefully, and to discover among the ruins of the old dispensation a new set of enduring satisfactions.


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IMG_9875, originally uploaded by Andy Waterman.
Rollapaluza ran a hill climb event on Swains Lane in Hampstead on 22/7/10 to promote Simon Warren's new book "100 Greatest Cycling Climbs: A Road Cyclist's Guide to Britain's Hills". Good book and a great event - there are loads more photos on my Flickr