Historians have long debated just how sharp a break in cultural values the First World War effected. Many point to the beginnings of shifts in the 1900s and 1910s. Morton White, for example, long ago demonstrated that philosophers, economists, historians, and legal theorists were all engaged in a "revolt against formalism." Henry May, in The End of American Innocence, showed a similar shift in literature and art. James McGovern traced a "prewar" revolution in sexual morals. More recently, Kathy Peiss has detailed how working-class men and women, often immigrants, often ignored Victorian proprieties in their search for fun. Historians of women are particularly insistent that the twenties did not represent a fundamental shift in women's lives or expectations. And, if one looks to employment, education, average age at marriage, and other measures, they are clearly correct.

Nonetheless the War did mark a watershed, especially with regard to women. The body of this webpage will seek to demonstrate this contention. For now, it is important to make a historiographical point. One cannot set dates in cultural history in the same precise fashion as in diplomatic or military history. The "guns of August" began World War I. No similar event marked the beginning of post-Victorian America. This means that, in seeking to periodize cultural history, one needs to distinguish between early manifestations of change and their adoption by broad segments of the society. Elite circles, for example, read and discussed Freud in the prewar years. By the twenties, he was "all the rage," as the slang of the day had it. What had the war to do with this? It made Freud's view of mankind as driven by irrational urges seem like common sense. In a similar way, I will argue, the war contributed to the discrediting of a number of Victorian beliefs and to the adopting of an array of "modern" alternatives.