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Show Life as an Adolescent 51 ty. She was both a playful sociable young woman and a self analyzing, contemplative, free dom-loving thinker. She delight ed in dates to see Camille at the Wilkes Theater, basket parties with friends in their Ford autos, train rides to Saltair resort for dancing on the pavilion ball room floor while strains of McClellan's 50-piece orchestra wafted over the sunset-illumi nated waters of Great Salt Lake. Yet she wrote stories in which the heroine Sylvia (Latin Sylvus for forest) refuses to lea ve the aspen trees of her mountain ranch for city education or for marriage." As Madelyn at about eighteen years of age. a romantic and an idealist, she picked the mountain top with its elevated vista as her standard for an ennobling goal, in place of a conventional LDS religious symbol like etemal Iife." It is a commentary on Madelyn's culture that the two directions of her compatible-that she felt she had to choose. For all the cartooning of girls of the 1910s and '20s as suf fragettes, flappers, and liberated young women with bobbed hair, Utah girls of Madelyn Stewart's social set were restricted nature were not by many genteel, cultural inhibitions. They danced and played bridge; they flirted and dashed around to parties in their Fords and Hudsons; they wore filmy dresses to the Prom escorted by young men in tuxedos; and on quiet evenings they crocheted and embroidered linens for their trousseaus. As readers of romances, they expected love to strike, to lead them through terribly exciting courtships and glamorous weddings before they settled down as young matrons to support their husbands in the family business and rear children. Girls from loyal Mormon families were also trained to respond cheerfully to calls by their bishops to teach and to serve as officers in the Primary, M.I.A., and Relief Society. They |
