Joshua Zeitz
Josh Zeitz has taught American history and politics at Cambridge University, Harvard University, and Princeton University. He is the author of several books on American political and social history and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Smithsonian Magazine, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Dissent, American Heritage, and Mother Jones.
Josh also appeared as a commentator on two PBS documentaries –Boomer Century, and Ken Burns's Prohibition.
A former gubernatorial speechwriter and policy aide, Josh earned his B.A. with highest honors at Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. in American History at Brown University. He lives in Hoboken and Ocean Grove, New Jersey with his wife, Angela Zeitz, an artist, and their two daughters.
Follow him on Twitter at @JoshuaMZeitz
“A study of fifty women conducted in 1887 revealed that the corset forcibly contracted their waists by anywhere between two and a half and six bodies. The pressure it applied to women's bodies averaged twenty-one pounds but could reach as high as eighty-eight pounds. Tight-lacing was thus akin to crushing oneself slowly from all sides. As a harsh critic of the corset noted, 'It is evident, physiologically, that air is the pabulum of life, and that the effects of a tight cord round the neck and of tight-lacing only differ in degree.... for the strangulations are both fatal. To wear tight stays is in many cases to wither, to waste and to die.”
“(…) the New Woman of the 1920s boldly asserted her right to dance, drink, smoke, and date—to work her own property, to live free of the strictures that governed her mother’s generation. (…) She flouted Victorian-era conventions and scandalized her parents. In many ways, she controlled her own destiny.”
“(...)"Flapper"— the notorious character type who bobbed her hair, smoked cigarettes, drank gin, sported short skirts, and passed her evenings in steamy jazz clubs, where she danced in a shockingly immodest fashion with a revolving cast of male suitors.”