The "Outrageous" Younger Set

A Young Girl Attempts to Explain Some of the Forces That Brought It Into Being

ELIZABETH BENSON

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the sixth article to appear in Vanity Fair from the pen of Elizabeth Benson, the thirteen year old sophomore at Barnard College. All of these papers have dealt with the attitude and philosophy of the Younger Generation. In the article following she writes of the forces in America that have brought into being the so-called "outrageous'' generation about which she writes. The success of this series in Vanity Fair has been so great that Miss Benson has made them an integral part of her first book, announced for early autumn by Greenberg Publisher, Inc. To the material which has already appeared in these pages she has added a number of hitherto unpublished essays

THERE are a few understanding souls among the older generation who have pointed out, with kindly tolerance, that every younger generation has been the sorrow of its elders: that every new crop of youngsters is wild, rampageous; indecorous and rebellious at restraint. They are also generous enough to point out that it is only through the lusty protest of youngsters against the existing order of things, that social, spiritual, mechanical, industrial or political progress is recorded.

But even these tolerant defenders of the young have shaken their heads a little over us, admitting deprecatingly that we are a little hit more of a handful than the other previous crops of youthful rebels.

Many of our defenders have sought anxiously for causes of the present revolt of youth against law, society and parental authority. They have sent out ponderous questionnaires to college students, which we have answered with our tongues in our cheeks, taking an impish delight in confounding our questioners. For the truth is that we haven't particularly wanted to he understood and explained away; it has been too much fun, all this rumpus that we've been kicking up.

But we do, as a matter of fact, understand ourselves pretty well. We "psyche" ourselves with most amazing frankness. We don't mind telling each other just what we really are— but we hate to tell our elders. We are intensely aware of the forces which produced us, and we gloat in that awareness. It makes us feel so much wiser than our elders who can only shake their heads so helplessly and call upon heaven to witness that we are a terrible lot.

The younger American generation of which I am writing will go down to history as our post-war generation. In this article I am going to attempt to explain ourselves—the young people of today, children, let us say, of 15 to 19; to point out the forces which brought us (for I am certainly one of them, though still only 18) into being; to tell our critics what we are like, what we think of ourselves, and what forces, we believe, brought us into being.

The basic explanation of our wildness—and the wildness of every younger generation, for that matter-—is a law of nature. A wise but ironic providence has ordained that an individual's basal metabolism rises rapidly during childhood, reaching its high point around the nineteenth year. Now a high basal metabolism means a tremendous amount of energy, which has to be expended somehow, or the engine will blow up. Hence it is that the flapper of today, and her boy friend, dance all night, take a sunrise swim, attend classes in college (with eyes clearer and brighter than those of their instructors, who slept their decent eight hours), then dash oh to a matinee or take a hike, eat an enormous dinner, go to the theatre and wind up at a night club.

This high rate of energy discharge declines very gradually until the individual reaches the ripe age of thirty-five, when the decline begins to be more marked. The girl who could once dance all night now sits out a few dances and is willing to leave a little after midnight, thinking, even a little fondly, of her bed. The erstwhile "boy friend", for whom all sorts of bad ends were predicted, has settled down and is making a good husband. The desperados of twenty years before now begin to be pessimistic critics of the younger generation, and tiresome raconteurs of "the good old days".

Of course we shall grow older and settle down. We shall have to bow to nature's law just as every other generation of exuberant youth before us has done. We know it and we do not share the fears of the older generation that we will tremendously speed up the world and run it of! its axis. Nor do we expect life to continue to be the gay, mad adventure that it now is. We may even become rather smug as we grow older, though we certainly don't intend to.

AND now we will leave nature's responsibility and skip to that of heredity—for in that field only Providence and Professor Mendel can place the praise, or blame; and point out a few changes in science, society, and knowledge, which have caused our energy to be expended a little differently from the way our parents expended theirs when they were the wild young generation.

"Oh, now we are going to have the W AR thrown at 11s," you say wearily. "We were expecting it!" Yes, you are going to have the WAR used as an explanation of us, the younger generation, and of you, too, who blamed us on the war. But I am not going to recite all the old arguments of middle-aged novelists who have been erudite enough to point out that cocktail drinking and sex freedom and wild parties were a means of forgetting and escaping the strain of the war. Those arguments are so well known, so fresh in the reader's mind, that I will make no mention of them all.

But it was not the war alone which was responsible for the wave of freedom upon which the younger generation of today is riding high, and for which it is so universally condemned. It had a much more respectable genesis than war hysteria. It was mothered by a brood of reformers such as good old, ridiculous old, crusading old Carrie Nation. That doughty female has passed into the limbo of history, to be unearthed only as a subject of humorous analysis in the ideal-destroying pages of The American Mercury, anti so, too, is poor Emmeline Pankhurst now little more than a memory to be smiled at, but the forces which they and their brood helped to bring into being have been largely instrumental in moulding the character of the wild young sex radicals of today.

The Nineteenth Amendment was passed while the present younger generation was just entering adolescence. The shout of "Equality of the Sexes" mingled in our alert young ears with the rattle of broken windows and the clanging of axes upon election booths. We cut our second teeth on "Women's Rights", "The double versus the single standard of morality", and "Birth control". Margaret Sanger was one of our first memories. "Sex", which had been a word to whisper and blush at, was flung at us on banners carried by our crusading mothers. The wrappings were removed from the piano legs in Victorian homes and such unmentionable words as "male" and "female" mingled with "personal freedom", "sex equality" and "prohibition" in arguments between our parents around the dinner table. We didn't wholly shut our ears.

UNDER such a bombardment of sex talk, and drink talk, and equal rights talk, and double standard talk did we enter upon our adolescence. We saw women don men's clothes and men's personalities and force their way into business. We saw them snatch the ballot from unwilling hands and turn municipal government, throughout the country, topsy turvy. We read of women who retained their own names when they married.

Then, as soon as American women began to yell for sex equality, a vast flood of sex literature was let loose upon the land. As soon as sex was admitted into American literature—at first by way of translations of Continental classics—we were not slow to seize our opportunities for knowledge. It was with no regret that we laid aside the Elsie books and the Alger series and fell upon Anatole France, Voltaire, Flaubert, Maupassant, Boccaccio, Rabelais, and Gautier.

And there was, of course, no restraining our joy when the delightful pastime of psychoanalysis was presented to our eager young minds. We did not invent psychoanalysis, and we can scarcely be blamed for having profited by it. We studied Freud, argued .Jung, checked our dreams by Havelock Ellis, and toyed lightly with Adler. And all these authorities warned us of the danger in repressing our normal instincts and desires. Most of us have felt very virtuous in making up our minds not to invite mental and physical ill-health by suppressing our natural tendencies, but (to give away a secret of the sacred and honorable order of the younger generation) most of us talk big—and step pretty carefully.

As one of my own friends puts it, "I certainly don't want to be a victim of repressed desires, but I'll be hanged if I want to make a mess of my life."

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At any rate we don't lock ourselves in our bedrooms and experience vicarious thrills over Robert W. Chambers' The Common Law or Elinor Glyn's Three Weeks—as our parents did.

We, the younger generation of today, are the children of crusaders. Our parents were always in a terrific stew over something. If it wasn't "women's rights" it was the war; if it wasn't war, it was prohibition; if it wasn't prohibition, it was a crusade against fundamentalism in religion.

The crusade for prohibition was such a worthy one! How nobly our parents fought and bled for it! And we have come along to bear the brunt of it. It is scarcely necessary to point out that the younger generation does not gaze with uplifted, adoring eyes upon the spectacle of its elders taxing themselves billions of dollars for a prohibition law which does not prohibit. We can have little respect for a law which its own makers, the older generation, show no respect for. If the older generation had only made its laws with honesty and common sense, we would not have grown up to he rebels against the law. We bid you look to the mote in your own eye and the quality of liquor in your own cellar.

We do not charge, as our anti-Volsteadian elders do, that prohibition has made us drink. History shows that young men have always drunk and that they drink in other countries where liquor flows freely and legally. It is safe to conclude that people will always drink, no matter what law says that they shall not. As for the liquor consumed by young girls today no one seriously contends that prohibition has caused them to drink, or has prevented them from doing it. Girls smoke now; their mothers did not; they wear knee-high dresses now instead of the sweeping skirts which once saved the street cleaners so much unpleasant work. Drinking by the girl members of the younger generation is an expression of the feminism which we inherited from our crusading mothers. If the "hoy friend" has a right to take a drink, we naturally ask ourselves: why haven't we?

But what we do charge against prohibition is that the inability to get good liquor and to consume it openly has kept many of us—of course I mean the hoys, particularly—from learning to drink with moderation and discrimination, and has made many of us drink when we did not really wish to, out of sheer, exuberant revolt against an absurd law.

Then those crusading parents of ours started something else which we, their children, are left to finish— and be blamed for. I refer to the crusade against fundamentalism in religion. Our parents decided that there was no hell of brimstone and forked-tailed devils, no method of frying erring souls on red-hot coals. Fine! Our elders were too set in their ways to get much good out of that happy discovery, but we, of the plastic age, have not been slow to seize upon the freedom of action which comes to people when fear of eternal damnation is removed. They can't scare us any more by telling us that we will burn in hell forever and ever, amen, if we aren't good little girls and boys, and at home and in bed by ten o clock.

So we have learned to prefer an automobile trip to the country to being bored and antagonized by the Elmer Gantrys of our churches, or even to listening to our more enlightened preachers. I feel safe in saying that the automobile has done more to reduce the number of churchgoing persons of all ages than any other single factor. But it was not the younger generation which invented the automobile. That, too, we inherited from the older generation. The automobile differentiates the youth of this generation from its parents' youth by many centuries, by the difference between the beast of burden age and the machine age.

Don't forget that we are not the only people living our own lives. Our parents are also having a fairly good time. They are living too much the same sort of lives as we are to cast the first stone. Hence it is left to the professional noise-makers, in the older generation, to grow alarmed about us —teachers, preachers, editorial writers.

There is still another factor in the fashioning of the present younger generation-—-physical education and biological instruction in schools, colleges and magazines. When it was discovered that a girl's body was a machine which could stand exercise as well as a boy's a stride toward freedom and sanity was taken—a stride leading directly toward the present younger generation.

Women began to go in violently for athletics. The wasp w'aist emerged from the harness of steel and whalebone, and a normal twenty-six inch waist came into fashion. Skirts were lifted permanently from the rank of sidewalk sweepers and elevated to a discreet position halfway between the ankle and the knee—all in the interest of athletics and hygiene. Our mothers had begun to study and to take care of their bodies before we were born, and we have but carried on the good work by becoming good golf players, channel swimmers and winners of tennis tournaments.

Nature, and war, and prohibition, and feminism, and psychoanalysis and new fashions in dress; a tottering religion, imitation of our elders, automobiles, radios and free money, the industrial era, indulgent parents and a new physical education—these forces have had their hand in baking the pic out of which, like the four and twenty blackbirds, has sprung the younger generation of today.

It may not be a dainty dish to set before a king, or upon the altar of civilization; but the waiter has certainly set it there, and there it sits. So, we feel justified in calling upon all those who have denounced and reviled us, and bidding them look upon us, not as individuals who have chosen their destiny, lnit as the inevitable products of that destiny. If we arc not what we should be, we are not wholly to blame and, so far as we can sec, there is very little that can be done about us.