With the general confusion as to what men want—“Shall I be fast or shall I be straight? Shall I help him succeed or join him only after he has? Shall I settle down or shall I keep young? Shall I have one child or four?”—these problems, once confined to certain classes, being now every girl’s problems—they have begun to turn for approval not to men but to each other. “Crushes” were once a boarding-school phenomenon—now any sort of courageous individualism makes a woman the center of a cult. Not only do Edna Millay, Helen Wills, Geraldine Farrar, and the Queen of Roumania have their disciples, but there are passionately admiring voices for Aimee Semple McPherson and even Ruth Snyder. What effect has this woman worship on the young girl herself?

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Girls Believe in Girls,” from 1930. 1930! It appears in the recently published A Short Autobiography, a collection of Fitzgerald’s essays. —Thessaly

(Thanks Sam MacLaughlin from McNally Jackson!)

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