Flappers

Flappers were a cultural force of the 1920s that would later be regarded as an emblem of the era. A new, modern woman who was self-assured, exuberant, adventurous, and sophisticated, the flapper embraced unconventional behavior and represented America’s changing attitudes toward cultural norms, language, and dress.

With youth culture on the rise due to urbanization, the flapper became the heroine of the 1920s. The origins of the word “flapper” are not entirely clear. In Great Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, it meant a woman of loose morals, possibly a prostitute; in 1908, however, The Times of London was using it to refer to young women who had not yet begun to wear long dresses or put up their hair, both considered signs of maturity at the time. In 1910, writer A. E. James started to write a series of stories called “Her Majesty the Flapper,” featuring a lively, flirtatious fifteen-year-old girl who embodied the now-familiar image of the flapper. The term did not achieve wide usage in America until the release of the popular Frances Marion film The Flapper (1920), which starred Olive Thomas as a girl in search of thrilling adventures in a town where having a soda with a boy in public or sneaking out of a party unchaperoned was considered scandalous.

Flappers represented a new type of freedom following the constraints of World War I. They rejected conventional female behavior in favor of what was perceived as a boyish style; they wore short skirts and makeup, bobbed their hair, listened to jazz, danced the Charleston, drank alcohol, smoked cigarettes, and talked about sex in a casual manner. Early in the 1920s, flappers epitomized the battle for freedom in terms of self-expression, female equality, and indulgence in pleasures. They believed that life should be lived moment to moment, not according to moral or societal conventions. Their behavior was modeled on the continental, bohemian colony of expatriates who remained in Paris after the war, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose novels chronicled the Jazz Age, and his wife Zelda. These early flappers were largely upper-class women who defied conventions and had acquired a worldly air abroad in Europe, but they soon became a model for others.

Iconic Image

Flappers wore their hair short, with curls on their cheeks, and were noted for their use of eye shadow and eyeliner, rouge, and brightly colored lipstick. They adopted a distinctive style of dress that was associated with French fashions, most notably those of designer Coco Chanel, but remained affordable to middle-class women as well as the upper class, since the simple lines of the clothes made them easy to mass produce. This new style featured short dresses with dropped waistlines, cloche hats, rolled-down silk stockings, and long strings of beads, combining beauty with functionality to afford the wearer a great deal of freedom. It also eliminated the need for waist-constraining corsets, which had often caused women to be short of breath.

The flapper became an ideal for women who wanted to be modern, chic, and carefree. By the mid-1920s, the flapper lifestyle was seen as a game rather than a social protest. Although always presented as young, flappers were no longer only teenagers; any woman could become one. Flappers had come to represent a lifestyle that was associated with the speakeasies, yet still acceptable for modern middle-class women who wanted greater personal freedom. This new self-assurance and self-awareness was represented in films by beautiful, energetic, independent female characters who were aware of their sexuality and knew how to get what they wanted. In the film It, Clara Bow plays a middle-class working girl in a department store who uses her sex appeal (the titular “it”) to capture the attention of the heir to the store and marry into wealth.

Impact

The flapper left her indelible mark on the language, dress, and behavior of American women. She was often labeled as bold for her outspoken nature and her use of slang; she was not a woman to be shocked by swearing or to censure the language of others. Flappers were energetic, independent, self-sufficient, and sure of themselves, and they ushered in a new era of freedom for women. The changing attitudes they inspired increasingly allowed women to enroll in colleges, enter the workforce, participate in politics, and generally play a greater role in society and public life.

Bibliography

Blackman, Cally. Twentieth Century Fashion: The Twenties and Thirties—Flappers and Vamps. Milwaukee, Wis.: Gareth Stevens, 2000. Discusses Chanel’s influence on the development of the flapper style.

Chadwick, Whitney, and Tirza True Latimer, eds. The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Discusses the influence of the expatriate society of Paris between the world wars.

Fass, Paula S. The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. A scholarly social history of the flappers.

Sagert, Kelly Boyer. Flappers: A Guide to an American Subculture. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Greenwood Press, 2010. Provides general information about the decade that produced the flappers.

Zeitz, Joshua. Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern. New York: Crown, 2006. A historical look at flappers and the influences of the Fitzgeralds, Chanel, and Bow.