The Rise and Fall of an All-American Catchphrase: 'Free, White, and 21'

[CBHagman]

A stunning look at one of the specific aspects of racism in American cinema. Do read the whole article and don't miss the clips.

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The saying emerged around 1828, when property ownership was removed as a prerequisite for suffrage, and voters needed only be free, white, and 21 (and also, it needn’t be said, male). It should have died with the passing of the 15th amendment in 1870, but of course racism is stronger than the law, and by the end of the century, legislators were working to bring the two back into harmony. In 1898, when Louisiana put forward its version of the grandfather clause, a judge asserted that the new legislation was simply a way of maintaining the “right of manhood,” deserved of all men “free, white, and twenty-one.”

Yet it took women to popularize the phrase—or fictional women at least. The expression figures in romance narratives starting as early as 1856. Later, Dorothy Dix, the nation’s first advice columnist, would recycle it, directed to young women. If the primary sphere of influence for the white male was in the voting booth, for the disenfranchised white woman it was the home. Her privilege was narrow but vital: to choose which white male to share it with.

Or, in envelope-pushing pre-code Hollywood dramas, how many. The 1931 film Strangers May Kiss presented itself as an experiment in whether women could possibly have romance without marriage. When the heroine’s aunt urges her to abandon a fling and settle, she answers, “I’m free, white, and 21, and I know my own mind.” As the ads made clear, the phrase was key not just to the film but also to a new type of woman: Hollywood made over 100 of these “fallen woman” films during the ’30s and ’40s, almost always with punishment coming for the woman in the end.