September 9, 2026 • 11 mins
In the 1920s, a certain set of women wanted to loosen up and have a good time. Today, we get into it with the flappers.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck, and Jerry's here doing the Charleston on Dave's behalf,
and this is Stuff You Should Know Short Stuff. Let's
go now. All right.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
The year is 1915, everybody, and the word flapper is
about to be introduced to the world by way of H. L. Minkin,
a writer who wrote a, I guess, an essay about
called the flapper for the literary magazine, The Smart Set.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
What a great mag.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
By the way, we should say that Private Eye is
not a rag over in the UK. So sorry, everybody.
I'm going to go ahead and assume The Smart Set
wasn't either. But in this article or essay, Mencken is
using a term that's already been established, flapper. It was,
I think, British slang for a young girl, right? He's saying, no, no, no.
(00:58):
We need to get more specific. There is a young
girl that's emerging. They're not here yet, but I can
see them coming out of the fabric of culture. And
they are not going to follow these standards and traditions
and moral codes that are handed down generation after generation.
There's this new thing called media that is coming up,
and that's what's going to influence them. And they're going
(01:21):
to be total trailblazers. And he was right. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
So the flapper would come along and kick what was
known as the Gibson Girl to the curb. The Gibson
Girl during the 1910s was created and popularized from an
illustrator named Charles Dana Gibson. And this was like if
you think of the Edwardian sort of corset wearing, updo
hair wearing, choker, you know, like choker. dress that goes,
(01:48):
a skirt that goes all the way to the past
the ankle and like a choker up to under the chin.
That's the Gibson girl look. And the flapper came along
and said, no, no, no, no. We want to have
more fun than that.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
They did. And they did. And it took the death
of tens of millions of people to get them there.
Because World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic were
a one-two punch that killed a lot of people around
the world. And in doing so, both of those things
adjusted gender norms to the extent that all of a sudden,
(02:23):
like the world couldn't afford to just keep women off
to the side any longer. They were needed more than ever,
like in the workforce, they needed to be educated. And
so it opened all these opportunities for women to just
kind of come out from under the thumb of their
fathers and then their husbands. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
And this kind of happened around 1920. When the Roaring
Twenties came on the scene, there was a new woman
emerging from the cocoon that kind of coincided with like, hey,
we'd like to have a right to vote, kind of
early feminist causes as well. And both the 18th and
19th Amendments were both pretty crucial to the rise of
(03:00):
this new kind of style of woman, which was prohibition,
which sent people into underground bars hanging out and then
the right to vote. And both of these things were
sort of like a rejection of the Victorian code that
came before.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Yeah, big time. I mean, this wasn't like a transition over,
you know, the course of decades that just one piece
followed another. This was like a razor blade cutting off
the old guard and starting anew. And it was led
by this leading edge of young, like early 20s people.
(03:40):
late teens girls who just completely just changed everything. They
went against so many norms. They started smoking. They started drinking.
Women did not do those things at that time. They
started wearing makeup. Women did not wear makeup unless you
were a sex worker or an actress. They just did
(04:01):
all this stuff that up to that point was just
not done. And they just started doing it all of
a sudden. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Two other big things that kind of spurred this was
the rise of the automobile. More and more people had cars.
So all of a sudden, not only could young women
like drive themselves places and they weren't literally sort of
under lock and key of their of their home or
their parents homes. But all of a sudden, boys and
young men could come along and pick them up and
take them out on a date. And, you know, sometimes
(04:28):
things would happen in cars and like everything was changing.
The other big one was the radio. KDKA in Pittsburgh
was the first, I guess, commercial broadcast station. And by 1924,
there were more than 600 of those. And all of
a sudden there was like music happening and movies happening
that featured different styles and young women like, you know,
(04:50):
dancing and having fun.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Yeah. People driving around in convertibles in New York, booming Jay-Z.
It was amazing.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
I thought that was so stupid. No, it was great.
Let's take a break and we'll come back. Chuck and
I are going to work out whether that was actually
stupid or not.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Also, Chuck, before we get started again,
(05:40):
I want to shout out Conger for writing this. This
is a Conger joint from How Stuff Works, this article was.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
That's right. Go check out Unladylike, the podcast. It's great.
And so is Kristen.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
Exactly. So there was a new woman that emerged from
that right to vote. You can kind of say that
those two amendments that came out so quickly together, the
18th and 19th, One was for the flappers. That was
the prohibition on alcohol because it created speakeasies, like you said.
(06:11):
The right to vote, that created this kind of other
thread of women called the new woman who were very
interested in being active politically and socially. The flappers were like, yeah,
you go have fun with that. We're going to go
get wasted and hang out in speakeasies in New York
and just live our funnest lives. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
Or maybe go see a Clara Bow movie because in 1922,
Clara Bow debuted in Beyond the Rainbow and kind of
defined the flapper look. She had that hair bobbed. She
had a little bit of makeup on. The flapper style
was really coming in vogue. In real life, you had
(06:53):
none other than Zelda Fitzgerald as a late teen when
she was with F. Scott Fitzgerald when he first gained fame.
I think I think before she was writing even, uh,
and she was sort of one of the first big
it girls, uh, and certainly, um, embodied that flapper style.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Yeah. Also, I don't want, I don't know who I
said was the first it girl, but I was wrong.
It was in some other, um, podcast a while back,
but I, I, whoever it was, was in like the
forties or fifties, but I think Clara Bow is the
actual first it girl. Okay. And then I guess Zelda
Fitzgerald was the first real life it girl, but, Let's
talk about some of those fashions that people like Claire
(07:33):
Bow and Zelda Fitzgerald rocked. A lot of it was
being designed by Coco Chanel.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Like the real deal Coco Chanel was designing in Paris
during this time. And that whole like Victorian era corset
S figure shape was just thrown totally out the window.
And instead it was boyish bodies with drapey boxy skirts, essentially.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Yeah, that was like that sack dress was like the
flapper uniform. The fabric literally was lighter. Conger found this
is pretty staggering, but the flapper dress had about seven
yards of fabric. A Victorian gown had about 20 yards
of fabric. So they literally shed weight in their clothing
to just be freer. The flapper dress basically was about
(08:26):
mid-calf in length. Um, by the late 1920s, it inched
above the knee a little bit. Um, but you know,
so they could dance so they could do the Charleston
and the, and the Foxtrot. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Um, they, people think like it immediately went up. That
is actually one thing that kind of slowly changed and it,
it was just that way for a couple of years. Yeah. Um,
one of the other things that is like, like you said,
the flapper uniform was the cloche hat. I never knew
that's what it was called. Yeah. But it's like a
almost brimless hat. It's very close to the head, usually
(08:59):
has a big bow. And it would show off their hairdo,
which is usually quite short. You mentioned that those Gibson
girls had like the big updo or else like long,
flowy hair. Another way to rebel against that was to
cut your hair very short and often very straight. And
sometimes with pomade, that was the flapper girl's haircut. I
(09:20):
think it was called the Eaton crop.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Yeah, and they might use the pomade to like slick
it back like a man might. They would show their–
a lot of those flapper dresses had no arms, so
they were showing their arms for the first time.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Scandalous.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Very scandalous. A lot of times with a lot of
like necklaces and bracelets and things like that. And the wool,
those like heavy black wool stockings went out of fashion
for a more sheer hosiery. And sometimes– oh, boy. They
would roll down that hosiery a little bit to like
a makeshift knee high.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Not a good look.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Oh, I think it is.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Do you? You like the roll down knee high look?
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Yeah, I was raised Baptist, all that stuff. is very titillating.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
I think my problem is I associate that with mama
for mama's family.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Yeah, that'll do it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
That'll definitely dampen your thoughts. Yes. So all of this
flapper party came and went in less than a decade.
I mean, Clara Bow hit the scene in 1922, and
she was the one in Beyond the Rainbow that really
like kind of set the standard. And by 1929, it
was all over because the Depression hit and everybody's like,
(10:29):
we don't have time for parties anymore. We got bigger
fish to fry now. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
And that was kind of it. The stock market crash
was like literally the very end. It was October 29th, 1929.
And it was just one of those events that kind
of kind of signified like the end of an era
and definitely the end of the flapper era.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Yeah. The fun was over. And so was prohibition, too,
because America really needed to start drinking again. So there
went the speakeasy and all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
And I think that means short stuff's over, too, though, right?
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Yeah. It's not just over, Chuck. It's out.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck, and Jerry's here doing the Charleston on Dave's behalf,
and this is Stuff You Should Know Short Stuff. Let's
go now. All right.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
The year is 1915, everybody, and the word flapper is
about to be introduced to the world by way of H. L. Minkin,
a writer who wrote a, I guess, an essay about
called the flapper for the literary magazine, The Smart Set.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
What a great mag.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
By the way, we should say that Private Eye is
not a rag over in the UK. So sorry, everybody.
I'm going to go ahead and assume The Smart Set
wasn't either. But in this article or essay, Mencken is
using a term that's already been established, flapper. It was,
I think, British slang for a young girl, right? He's saying, no, no, no.
(00:58):
We need to get more specific. There is a young
girl that's emerging. They're not here yet, but I can
see them coming out of the fabric of culture. And
they are not going to follow these standards and traditions
and moral codes that are handed down generation after generation.
There's this new thing called media that is coming up,
and that's what's going to influence them. And they're going
(01:21):
to be total trailblazers. And he was right. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
So the flapper would come along and kick what was
known as the Gibson Girl to the curb. The Gibson
Girl during the 1910s was created and popularized from an
illustrator named Charles Dana Gibson. And this was like if
you think of the Edwardian sort of corset wearing, updo
hair wearing, choker, you know, like choker. dress that goes,
(01:48):
a skirt that goes all the way to the past
the ankle and like a choker up to under the chin.
That's the Gibson girl look. And the flapper came along
and said, no, no, no, no. We want to have
more fun than that.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
They did. And they did. And it took the death
of tens of millions of people to get them there.
Because World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic were
a one-two punch that killed a lot of people around
the world. And in doing so, both of those things
adjusted gender norms to the extent that all of a sudden,
(02:23):
like the world couldn't afford to just keep women off
to the side any longer. They were needed more than ever,
like in the workforce, they needed to be educated. And
so it opened all these opportunities for women to just
kind of come out from under the thumb of their
fathers and then their husbands. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
And this kind of happened around 1920. When the Roaring
Twenties came on the scene, there was a new woman
emerging from the cocoon that kind of coincided with like, hey,
we'd like to have a right to vote, kind of
early feminist causes as well. And both the 18th and
19th Amendments were both pretty crucial to the rise of
(03:00):
this new kind of style of woman, which was prohibition,
which sent people into underground bars hanging out and then
the right to vote. And both of these things were
sort of like a rejection of the Victorian code that
came before.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Yeah, big time. I mean, this wasn't like a transition over,
you know, the course of decades that just one piece
followed another. This was like a razor blade cutting off
the old guard and starting anew. And it was led
by this leading edge of young, like early 20s people.
(03:40):
late teens girls who just completely just changed everything. They
went against so many norms. They started smoking. They started drinking.
Women did not do those things at that time. They
started wearing makeup. Women did not wear makeup unless you
were a sex worker or an actress. They just did
(04:01):
all this stuff that up to that point was just
not done. And they just started doing it all of
a sudden. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Two other big things that kind of spurred this was
the rise of the automobile. More and more people had cars.
So all of a sudden, not only could young women
like drive themselves places and they weren't literally sort of
under lock and key of their of their home or
their parents homes. But all of a sudden, boys and
young men could come along and pick them up and
take them out on a date. And, you know, sometimes
(04:28):
things would happen in cars and like everything was changing.
The other big one was the radio. KDKA in Pittsburgh
was the first, I guess, commercial broadcast station. And by 1924,
there were more than 600 of those. And all of
a sudden there was like music happening and movies happening
that featured different styles and young women like, you know,
(04:50):
dancing and having fun.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Yeah. People driving around in convertibles in New York, booming Jay-Z.
It was amazing.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
I thought that was so stupid. No, it was great.
Let's take a break and we'll come back. Chuck and
I are going to work out whether that was actually
stupid or not.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Speaker 1 (05:10):
(05:40):
I want to shout out Conger for writing this. This
is a Conger joint from How Stuff Works, this article was.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
That's right. Go check out Unladylike, the podcast. It's great.
And so is Kristen.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
Exactly. So there was a new woman that emerged from
that right to vote. You can kind of say that
those two amendments that came out so quickly together, the
18th and 19th, One was for the flappers. That was
the prohibition on alcohol because it created speakeasies, like you said.
(06:11):
The right to vote, that created this kind of other
thread of women called the new woman who were very
interested in being active politically and socially. The flappers were like, yeah,
you go have fun with that. We're going to go
get wasted and hang out in speakeasies in New York
and just live our funnest lives. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
Or maybe go see a Clara Bow movie because in 1922,
Clara Bow debuted in Beyond the Rainbow and kind of
defined the flapper look. She had that hair bobbed. She
had a little bit of makeup on. The flapper style
was really coming in vogue. In real life, you had
(06:53):
none other than Zelda Fitzgerald as a late teen when
she was with F. Scott Fitzgerald when he first gained fame.
I think I think before she was writing even, uh,
and she was sort of one of the first big
it girls, uh, and certainly, um, embodied that flapper style.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Yeah. Also, I don't want, I don't know who I
said was the first it girl, but I was wrong.
It was in some other, um, podcast a while back,
but I, I, whoever it was, was in like the
forties or fifties, but I think Clara Bow is the
actual first it girl. Okay. And then I guess Zelda
Fitzgerald was the first real life it girl, but, Let's
talk about some of those fashions that people like Claire
(07:33):
Bow and Zelda Fitzgerald rocked. A lot of it was
being designed by Coco Chanel.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Like the real deal Coco Chanel was designing in Paris
during this time. And that whole like Victorian era corset
S figure shape was just thrown totally out the window.
And instead it was boyish bodies with drapey boxy skirts, essentially.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Yeah, that was like that sack dress was like the
flapper uniform. The fabric literally was lighter. Conger found this
is pretty staggering, but the flapper dress had about seven
yards of fabric. A Victorian gown had about 20 yards
of fabric. So they literally shed weight in their clothing
to just be freer. The flapper dress basically was about
(08:26):
mid-calf in length. Um, by the late 1920s, it inched
above the knee a little bit. Um, but you know,
so they could dance so they could do the Charleston
and the, and the Foxtrot. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Um, they, people think like it immediately went up. That
is actually one thing that kind of slowly changed and it,
it was just that way for a couple of years. Yeah. Um,
one of the other things that is like, like you said,
the flapper uniform was the cloche hat. I never knew
that's what it was called. Yeah. But it's like a
almost brimless hat. It's very close to the head, usually
(08:59):
has a big bow. And it would show off their hairdo,
which is usually quite short. You mentioned that those Gibson
girls had like the big updo or else like long,
flowy hair. Another way to rebel against that was to
cut your hair very short and often very straight. And
sometimes with pomade, that was the flapper girl's haircut. I
(09:20):
think it was called the Eaton crop.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Yeah, and they might use the pomade to like slick
it back like a man might. They would show their–
a lot of those flapper dresses had no arms, so
they were showing their arms for the first time.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Scandalous.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Very scandalous. A lot of times with a lot of
like necklaces and bracelets and things like that. And the wool,
those like heavy black wool stockings went out of fashion
for a more sheer hosiery. And sometimes– oh, boy. They
would roll down that hosiery a little bit to like
a makeshift knee high.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Not a good look.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Oh, I think it is.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Do you? You like the roll down knee high look?
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Yeah, I was raised Baptist, all that stuff. is very titillating.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
I think my problem is I associate that with mama
for mama's family.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Yeah, that'll do it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
That'll definitely dampen your thoughts. Yes. So all of this
flapper party came and went in less than a decade.
I mean, Clara Bow hit the scene in 1922, and
she was the one in Beyond the Rainbow that really
like kind of set the standard. And by 1929, it
was all over because the Depression hit and everybody's like,
(10:29):
we don't have time for parties anymore. We got bigger
fish to fry now. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
And that was kind of it. The stock market crash
was like literally the very end. It was October 29th, 1929.
And it was just one of those events that kind
of kind of signified like the end of an era
and definitely the end of the flapper era.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Yeah. The fun was over. And so was prohibition, too,
because America really needed to start drinking again. So there
went the speakeasy and all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
And I think that means short stuff's over, too, though, right?
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Yeah. It's not just over, Chuck. It's out.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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