Old Style Parents and New Style Sons

New York Tribune

Sunday, August 13, 1922

Old Style Parents And New Style Sons

By AN ANXIOUS MOTHER 

Illustrations by JEFFERSON MACHAMER

One lad of twenty said in all sincerity and seriousness that he never expected to marry for “women bore me sick” FROM the day he was born I have supported him, this manly little son of mine, who has just rounded out his thirteenth year and who stands confident and opinionated upon the threshold of manhood. There have been no secrets of life that we have not shared. Our relations are as frank as it is possible for relations between mother and son to be. Each new phase of life and character we have met together with understanding. Nor has it ever occurred to me that anything could come up that would cause me continued worry and anxiety about my boy’s future. The flapper and her attitude toward life have interested me not at all. If ever I have given her thought it has been that the papers and periodicals have been largely at fault in increasing her sense of her own importance by giving her as much prominence in print as a coming election. That she should be an influence in the life of My Son! Such a preposterous idea never entered my head. That was eons ago. Today she is the strongest factor in the development of this child of mine. She has thrown a shadow over our understanding. I cannot “get” his point of view--this emphatic approval of all and anything a flapper may do-- and he cannot understand why I do not approve of her. For the first time we are a bit intolerant of each other’s attitude, for though we have disagreed before there has always been understanding of why the other one believed. This draws such fine lines of distinction between the privileges and conventionalities, or rather lack of them, proper for the flapper and improper for a married woman or any one past the budding years; he seems to consider any wild act, if performed by a flapper, as quite the “cat’s ankle,” as he says, that I frankly admit I am worried. I find myself fascinated by every word uttered by this feminine ruler of the new order. Her manners and mental attitude interest but they do not give light, while I approve and grope to find a safe way for him to enjoy a happy normal life and not lose his respect for womanhood as I fear, in time, he must, if his attitude of mind continues without check along the lines developed this year. He went away to boarding school just a little boy with an unusual fund of interesting knowledge such as a boy who has been intimately associated with men and women who earn their living by doing things would acquire. Far be it from him to consider meeting the President of the United States in the White House an unusual event. He is neither conceited nor overbearing in his acceptance of life, but he has grown up with a slightly different point of view from the boy who does not enjoy opportunities for seeing things from the inside. To explain, some years ago, when President Wilson was in office, it was my duty to go to Washington to interview him. Thinking it would be an experience my son, then eight, would like to recall in later years, I took him from the little private country school for a few days at the capital. We were received in the course of time by the President, who showed a kindly interest in the boy, keeping his arm about him throughout the interview. We later visited all the public buildings and I do not recall that the visit to the White House was mentioned again: it was all in the day’s work. The woman at the head of the school told me that she waited all day, after Tom’s return, for him to mention his visit. But not a word. At supper table she casually said, “Tom, did you meet the President?” “Oh, yes,” he answered. “What did he say?” “Why,” he said “’Good morning,’ to me, and it was afternoon, so I said ‘Good afternoon, Mr. President.’” Summer time, my boy has been on a farm in the White Mountains, where he has entered the life of the community by singing in the choir; taking up the collection and, as near as I can learn, by attending every dance and buying ice cream cones for the entire party with money he has earned by raking hay, or hoeing potatoes, or milking cows. Girls have been his comrades. But at thirteen he returns from school where small boys are in the minority in stanch defense of the flapper. In defiance of all else his psychology is an emotional hieroglyphic to which I do not hold the master key. From his slant of life I should judge him at least sixteen. Certainly his main interest in life is the flapper whom he allows all sorts of liberties (mentally) that he does not concede to married women, including his mother, who he considers old fashioned. He confided to Nellie Revell, the brave pioneer of women press agents who has lain three years on her back In St. Vincent’s Hospital, that I am old fashioned, and it shook Nellie so with mirth that had Dr. Lorenz been present he certainly would have forbidden another visit from the subadolescent caller. Nellie, who has known me through the hectic years that, as a newspaper woman, I have been intimately connected with the opera, the theater and the motion picture world, later said: “To think that I should live to see the day that you are considered old fashioned!” Going over some mail the other day I ran across a letter to my son from a girl his own age, the daughter of a well known couple, both of whom are prominent in the writing world. Imagine reading: “Mother has read your first four letters, but she did not read the one that arrived to-day and she will read no more, for I shall tactfully arrange it that she doesn’t.” I spoke of it to Tom and he said, “Mother, can’t I have any privacy? Do you think you have a right to read my letters unless I give them to you? And why should her mother read the letters I write her?” Just before vacation I spent several days at the school, where I met many of the pupils, most of them ready to enter college. They were worldly-wise specimens of masculinity. Cynics, weary of life. They had attended so many “petting” parties (my vocabulary considerably increased during the visit and “necked” so many girls that no longer does the girl lure and mystify. Those boys were bored with life and, yes, with the flapper! One lad of twenty, the son of a Middle Western minister, who believes he knows all that life holds, told me in all sincerity and seriousness that he never expected to marry, for “women bore me sick.” “My!” he ejaculated, “The girls do not even give you a chance to start the petting. I just tell them nowadays when they start anything that I am not in love with them and that they cannot make a fool of me. “One girl at home was awfully good looking and charming. I used to take her about a good deal and we had lots of fun for several months. Then one night she began this ‘petting’ business. I told her I did not want to start petting. In injured tones she told me that she was not a bad girl but that everybody ‘necked’ and that there was no fun going out unless you did. Well, that friendship is over, because I have had all the fun and torture of petting parties I want to have.” Another lad, seventeen, from a small town upstate, a handsome lad of wealth and position who vibrates personality, spent several hours frankly discussing the flapper. That is one of the astounding things about this whole flapper business, the frankness with which the boy of to-day will discuss her with older folks as well as with other boys. It is not a matter of making a confidant of some one, but just discussion. It is considered no breach of honor for a group of boys to sit around and catalogue the girls they know as those who will be “petted,” those who will be “necked” (the fine distinction in “necked” and “petted” is still a mystery to me) and to what degree. They discuss the characteristics of the girls with the same frankness and impersonal manner they use in discussing the qualifications of a ball player. The most intimate things are topics of conversation. Not only the methods of what in my days was called “spooning” but the results attendant are analyzed and studied as though the flapper were under the microscope in a biological laboratory. One youth with a world-weary voice and a he-flapper manner told me without boasting just as a matter of making conversation that he had kissed every girl in his set, until his kisses had become absolutely perfunctory and blasé. Merely an observance of a social custom established and insisted upon by the species flapper, who in some way seem to come through unburned and--miracle of miracles--even without a singeing of the wings! Now again to my sub-adolescent son. He is anxiously awaiting the day that he will be old enough to imprint his lips upon the cheek of some flapper he likes. As near as I can understand it, any flapper will do for the initial kiss--the only requirement is that he likes her. He already has the frankness of the younger set in discussing life; voices his desires to me without blush or hesitancy, which is, of course, as I wish it, for I have a feeling that as long as things are frankly discussed between us just so long is he safe. Already he has completely mastered the vocabulary of the flapper, the flopper and the shifter. He is in a prep school for boys where the ages range from twelve to twenty. The younger boys watch every move of the old and build their ideals and conversation on the attitude of their elders toward girls at the dances, the meets and the ball games. They have all the older boys catalogued, those who are “neckers” and successful; those who would be “neckers” and unsuccessful. They know the boys who are seriously in love and distinguish them from the more flopper. “But, my dear,” I said to him as he discussed his plans for getting a flapper this summer, “don’t you realize by making kissing so promiscuous you will lower your own standard of womankind?” “You’re old fashioned, mother,” he re marked; “kissing won’t make any difference.” I tried to impress him with the errors in the social laxity of the flapper or so at least it seems to me, a mother of thirty-three, who has seen the intimate side of the life of the theater, the moving picture, the newspaper. “Don’t you understand that if you expect this kissing of every girl you take anywhere, and all the other boys have the same expectation, when you marry, possibly, every boy or almost every boy in your set can say: ‘There goes Mrs. So-and-So; I used to “neck” her.’” “Well, I don’t care, mother. Men usually do not say anything about other men’s wives, and, anyway, she will be my wife, and no more ‘necked’ than any of the other men’s wives.” I retreated into silence. A sixteen-year-old chum of my boy came up. The conversation once more got under way. The sixteen-year-old, with soft fuzz growing on his face almost profusely enough to warrant the weekly use of a razor, spoke as frankly as my son, and with the same lack of embarrassment. He said that he usually stayed at home because he feit out of it, not being able to get up the courage to “pet” a girl, “though,” he asserted, “my boy friend has kissed every girl he knows, and he is certainly tired of women.” Another student of eighteen joined us, and the three boys began to catalogue the girls that had attended the meet the day before. I confess my sense of propriety, which I have always considered far too broad, was shocked. “All the girls know we discuss them,” was the answer when I spoke of what seemed to be an un-chivalrous conversation. “You know they are not bad,” was remarked, “’’Evil to him who evil thinks.’ That is their motto.” “Well, I am off to call on Elizabeth, said the oldest boy, and down the hill he went toward the little village. Elizabeth, I learned, is a miss of nearly sixteen who has usurped the place of the former college widow. She never has less than eleven callers a day each having the privilege of “petting” or “necking” her. She has an individual pet name for each of her floppers and she never gets them mixed. All of the boys get the thrill they are looking for. Even one of the masters is at her flap and call. All of the boys know that all of the others are among the privileged. Nobody seems to mind. “Will any of the boys marry this successor to the college widow?” “Certainly not, but she’s a good kid.” . . . Well, all I can say is that I am beginning to feel that there will soon be a Twentieth Amendment, which will read: “The right of polyandry shall not be denied or abridged to any female citizen by the United States or by any state. Congress shall have power by appropriate legislation to enforce the provisions of this article.” Of course this is said partly in jest. But to an anxious mother it seems that unless the boys call a halt polyandry may become a reality, if it is not already here in the minds and hearts of the flappers, who, consciously or unconsciously, are asserting a woman’s right to many mates. Is it possible for my boy to hold the respect for womankind the men of his name have ever had? Where does his open acceptance of the manners of the flapper lead? What evil or good is portended by the fact that he does not mind the flapper wearing her stockings rolled down and exposing her bared knees with leg crossed, though he considers it highly objectionable for a married woman, or his mother to do such a thing? Will the grip of the flapper go and the standards I have tried to instill hold? Will my boy at eighteen be satiated with all the mysteries of life? Am I at thirty-three old fashioned and reactionary? Unable to progress with the world? Worrying unduly? A handicap to the progress of my son and all the other sons? Or am I sane in a bobbed-hair, flapper world? •