The History of Flappers
Flappers are the enduring symbol of the first generation of American girls to reach maturity after the 19th Amendment enfranchised women as voters. Flappers challenged women's traditional roles in courtship, family, education, sports and the workplace. They pioneered the 20th-century redefinition of women's social roles and sexuality. Despite the disapproval of their elders, flappers dated boys, cut their hair, drove automobiles, smoked cigarettes and drank bootleg alcohol.
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The Term
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In the vernacular of British sportsmen, a "flapper" was a duck too young to fly that could be collected alive during a hunt. The term was also applied in good humor to lively girls young enough to still wear their long hair loose or braided. In less respectable circles, a flapper was a very young prostitute. Male labor shortages during World War I created the American girl flapper, a young woman who knew that compensated labor outside the home was within her reach, as well as the emancipation that wages made possible.
Rights and Domesticity
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Flappers inherited rhetoric of liberation and the right to vote from the suffragettes of the previous generation. Thus supplied, flappers could be comfortably apathetic about political struggle. At this same time, birth control pioneers such as Margaret Sanger introduced condoms to America from Europe. Young women postponed marriage and rejected the Victorian "cult of domesticity" that exalted motherhood and the home as the only lifestyle suitable to the feminine disposition, which was described to be at polar extremes from the masculine.
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The Look
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Flappers challenged traditional male roles while adopting the pose of tomboyish masculinity. They "bobbed" their hair into short styles. They drank and smoked. Flappers rejected the corsets that constricted Victorian women into wasp waist dresses. They wore loose waistlines at hip level above short skirts. Breasts were de-emphasized. Flappers wore obvious cosmetics to darken their eyes and redden their lips to advance a new image of liberated sexuality. A 1922 New York Times editorial lamented their social insubordination and their intrusion into adult conversations.
The Charleston
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The Jazz Age created the flapper venue. Flappers sometimes called themselves "jazz babies" and "shebas," and their iconic dance, the Charleston, is a jazz piece. In the 1880s, the Charleston was a South Carolina black children's street dance. The dance appeared in minstrel shows and then the all-black Broadway musicals "Liza" (1922) and "Runnin' Wild" (1923). The Marx Brothers featured the Charleston in their 1925 Broadway production of "Coconuts." Jazz dancing drove the new styles of loose, unrestrictive clothing trimmed with fringe and accessorized with layers of long, bouncing beads.
The Cast
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Among other "traitors to their race," flapper women in the media included Colleen Moore, the torrid young kisser in the 1923 film "Flaming Youth." The first issue of Cosmopolitan in 1927 also launched a serialized novel titled "It" in which "it" was clearly sexuality. That same year, Clara Bow performed in the silent film version and was marketed as the "It Girl."
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit she is a flapper image by David Levinson from Fotolia.com
