Somerset Maugham on Women and Love

Abstract

Vast social, political, and economic changes shook the foundations of the modern world in the twentieth century, and these changes were accompanied by far-reaching modifications in moral attitudes and beliefs. The young were up in arms against the established moral code of their elders. The unrest, the skepticism, the insurgency, the iconoclastic stance, were the result in large part of the industrialization of life, and the uprootedness from communal ties that it brought about. The outbreak of the First World War hastened and intensified this movement. The twenties ushered in a decade of cynicism that was hailed as the new realism.