December 19, 2011 • 28 mins
Who were flappers? Were flappers feminists? In this episode, Caroline and Cristen take a closer look at the iconic women known as flappers, touching on everything from Zelda Fitzgerald to flapper fashion.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff mom never told you?
From house stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Caroline and I'm Kristin. So Kristen. Let's
(00:21):
blouse hip Hellen. Yeah, twenty ones can do. Wait. I
don't even know if that's one of the thing it
is nurts. You know what I hate on a date
A bunch of cherry smashes. Yeah, but a bunch of
my friends are biscuits though. Biscuits. Yeah, they don't like
cherry smashes. Okay, if people haven't guessed by now, we're
(00:41):
talking in slapper slang. Flapper eve yes, um of all
the slang. While you know, today's generation has text speak
like walls and uh, adorms, toasts, adorms, toasts, jelly uh,
we have nothing on flapper slang. Yeah, it really is
(01:05):
unrecognizable because at least tech speak, you kind of it's
abbreviations of things you can kind of figure it out.
But flapper speak, I mean they have dictionaries so that
people like us can understand what the heck they were
talking about. So why don't we explain a little bit
of what we were talking about. For instance, what is
let's blouse hip pound me that means let's go person
who likes to drink hooch um. And if you are
(01:26):
a biscuit, that means that you are a pettible flapper,
which means that people probably want to kiss you on
the mouth. But speaking of kisses on the mouth, if
you give cherry smashes, that means you have feeble kisses,
right and nerts means I am amazed starts I might
(01:48):
adopt that one actually, um. And uh, if you have
gotten a divorce recently, guess what you're out on? Borow
it's the bunk, which means I doubt that, Oh you
doubt that I'm out on pearl. Yeah, you're too young
for them. Uh. So today, yes, we're going to talk
about flappers and not just fringy Halloween costumes and Charleston,
(02:14):
but actually who these young women were and uh, what
was going on to to to spur these these zany
gals who talked in all this jib jam, all these
changes in society and in dress links and hair links
and everything. It came from a place and all of
(02:34):
this came about after World War One ended. Yes, Um,
all these terrible things were happening, um, but all of
a sudden, society started getting better. Um, even though so
many people had died in World War One and a
flu outbreak millions of people died. Oh yeah. In in
World War One we have a worldwide and estimated thirty
seven million deaths and injuries. And in the nineteen eighteen
(02:58):
Spanish flu pandemic right on the heels of World War One,
twenty to forty million deaths. So after this we see
this huge economic surge and significant social change. Yeah. And
kind of this notion for for younger people, um, whose
peers might have gone off to war and not come
back or caught the flu and not recovered. It's notion that, hey,
(03:21):
you know what, life is pretty short and unpredictable, and
we'd better have a dang all good time, right, And
not to mention that while all those men were out
at war, um, a lot of educational and employment opportunities
open for women, so they were they were jumping in
the game. Yeah. Uh. And we should talk about two
(03:42):
significant pieces of legislation the past in nineteen twenty, and
that is the eighteenth Amendment, also known as the Volstead Act,
which outlawed booze and kicked off prohibition. And then in
August of nineteen twenty, we have the passage of the
nineteenth Amendment give women the vote rights. All these crazy
(04:02):
things are happening. Women are running around voting. Alcohol is
driven underground. You have to knock on doors and they
open little split and you have to say a password
if you want booze wants a bathtub gin Yeah, sounds
like a stomach problem with happen or a good time
on the dance floor. That's true. But yeah, so other
things that were going on during this time. It really
(04:23):
affected the way people thought, hung out with each other, interacted. UM.
The first radio broadcast aired in nineteen twenty November. UM
and more and more people are going to the movies
each week, so you know, everybody's seeing these pop culture
representations of young people and it sort of creates this cycle.
But we'll get to that in a little bit. UM.
(04:45):
And thanks to and this is Man. These are quite
nice percentages in today's economic climate. The GDP at the
time was growing at a rate of four point eight
percent annually, and unemployment was hovering at a round three. Yeah,
so a lot of people had more money than they
had previously had. They were earning a lot more money,
(05:06):
and more people were moving to cities. So you had
this rise of this young culture that had more money
and more leisure time because they had things like refrigerators
and vacuums, and they had far more mobility. Car ownership
from nineteen nineteen to nineteen twenty nine, ten years, jumped
from six point eight million to a hundred and twenty
(05:28):
two million. Suddenly people had cars, and that was a
huge force behind this, uh, the emergence of teenage culture
and flappers, as well of women being able to get
behind the wheel and drive off to who knows where,
maybe park for a for a petting session. Yeah, umpily,
(05:52):
you did um well, And then yeah, you you mentioned
dating culture, teenage culture. This definitely changed how how young
people courted one another. Instead of the young man coming
into the parlor and sitting across the room from his beloved,
he would just you know, drive up outside her stoop
and honk the horn and she'd be like, pizza mama,
and you know, say some slang that I wouldn't understand.
(06:14):
She'd be like, this guy's really billow, which means he
lives fast and spends money freely. Yeah, we're gonna go
Barney mug is that courtship and our petting, oh man.
And then their parents would just blanche and wring their hands.
Yeah they were, oh dear, something terrible is going to see.
But I was interested to see that, um because because
(06:35):
I would have assumed that at the time, etiquette may
even such as Emily Post, would have said, hey, you
know what, ladies, this is not appropriate for you to drive. Uh,
don't don't get into cars with men. But pretty soon after, um,
like early in the nineteen twenties, Emily Post officially said, hey,
you know what, it's fine for women to drive by themselves.
(06:56):
Pretty early on the etiquette queen is telling that it's okay.
There was obviously, there was no stopping the emergence of
this new woman. Yeah, all of a sudden, young women
weren't tied to these lives of piety and domesticity. They
didn't immediately go into being from someone's daughter to being
someone's wife and taking care of a household. They were
pursuing education and employment. They were consuming all types of media,
(07:19):
reading a lot of magazines, books, going to movies, listening
to the radio, and yeah, they're pretty smart. Girls knew
a lot about a lot. Well, it seems like that that,
like you said hereing the um the reading of books, magazines,
going to the the movies, uh, listening to the radio. It
was that real emergence of mainstream pop culture that everyone
could kind of start partaking it. At the same time
(07:42):
that we have the rise in these um in these trends,
in this shift in attitude, um. And to describe the
new woman, who is we should differentiate the new woman
from the flapper because the new woman is a little
bit more of that um or politically liberated, sort of
like a Margaret Mead character. Anthropologist um and Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
(08:08):
who published magazine called The Forerunner, described the new woman
thus Lee. She says here she comes running out of
the prison and off the pedestal, chains off, crown off,
halo off. Just a live woman, live woman, sparkling with
electricity and sequence because she's a flapper. Um. Yeah. The
(08:29):
and we also have to differentiate between uh, these new
feminists knew knew, the new woman and suffragists because you
had the older generation really fighting for the vote. They
finally achieved, achieved what they've been fighting for for so long.
But then you have the Flappers and the New Woman
who were sort of looked down upon by some of
(08:50):
their suffragist role models as just like these kids just
want to have a good time. Look at all we
fought for and they're just running around in cars going
to petting parties. Right where is um? The suffrage movement stopped,
kind of stopped at that right to vote and kind
of wanted everything to the status quote to remain in
terms of being a wife, being a mother, and taking
(09:12):
care of the domestic sphere. But the New Woman wanted
to really challenge those gender roles, right. Professor Catherine Lavender said, Uh,
they meaning the Flappers and the and the New Woman,
they reacted against the emphasis in the woman movement on
female nurturance, selfless service, and moral uplift. They were they
were doing good things, they thought, but they were having
(09:33):
a good time while they did it. Right, And there
was also this idea of uh, sexual freedom being equated
with economic freedom and those going hand in hand, which
again the suffrage movement was certainly not so much about
sexual politics, right, and not everybody was very supportive of
the New Woman. Professor Samuel Holmes was quoted in The
(09:56):
New York Times of saying that women who attend college,
there by developing an interest in a career rather than children,
were harming the race, and that maybe eventually this would
calm down and they'd all go back home and have babies. Sorry,
Professor Holmes did not work that way. The depression amount
of ruined everybody's good time. But we still kept the
keys to the car um. Yeah. The the New York Times,
(10:19):
it really would just uh did not want to to
give the Flapper much credit for anything. This is from
in nine, which is after once that the Flapper has
really become a part of the popular culture. They write
that the Flapper had established the feminine right to equal
representation in such hitherto masculine fields of smoking, drinking, swearing, petting,
(10:43):
and disturbing the community. Piece. Yeah, very snarky New York
Times snarky. You're like, good for you women, you are
equally annoying and um. And that's the thing though about
the Flapper is that, yes, she was very focused on
on doing what she liked. Whether that meant that she
was kind of crossing those bounds into more masculine territories
(11:04):
of smoking and drinking and other things like that. But
she wasn't as she didn't really care so much to
start any kind of gender revolution. She just really wanted
to have a good time and if that meant, you know,
stepping on some gin while she did it, okay, having
a cigarette, putting finger waves in her hair, and really
focusing on looking good, right and having a fantastic time exactly. Um,
(11:31):
so I didn't. I wasn't aware of where the word
flapper came from, but apparently it's it was a word
that was borrowed from British slang meeting just a young woman.
But in nineteen fifteen, writer HL Lincoln described this new
sort of female identity that was emerging in the US,
and it's an identity kind of full of contradictions. So
this woman or this young woman is innocent but smart,
(11:55):
and she consumes modern media like movies, music and magazines
like we talked about that she's supposed to, I mean
willingly to sexy or racy material, but she's not sullied
by it, right, she doesn't. Uh. He writes that she
saw damaged goods without batting an eye and went away
wondering what the row over it was all about? Right,
which damaged goods we referenced in our sex education podcast
(12:19):
and what was damaged goods? Caroline? It was all about
the dangers of having sex. Right. It was the first
sex said movie that was really produced in the United States,
all about the soldier who contracted syphilis, passed onsitive baby,
and then killed himself. So kind of you can see
how that movie could be kind of controversial. But the
(12:40):
Flapper was like, Hey, I'm so good. So I think
a good way to differentiate them between that new woman
UH might be in the form of media. Consumer For instance,
the new woman would be all about the textbooks and
the pamphlets and more, the more actually minded literature of
(13:02):
the day, whereas the Flappers media was all just give me,
give me movies, give me magazines, give me tabloids about
Clara Beaux, all that stuff. Vanity Fair editor Frank crowin
Shield in nineteen fifteen characterized the Flapper UH saying that
his dinner companion, Yeah, this is interesting this quote. He said,
(13:24):
his dinner companion was very well informed. I put it
down naturally enough to wide reading. It couldn't all come
from experience their little bodies wouldn't hold so much so
thanks because she couldn't possibly like, you know, have life
experiences and learn all that stuff. But you know, it
was clear that these women were people all over characterized
(13:45):
them as as big readers and wanted to experience a
lot of stuff. And then in nine twenty, the movie
The Flapper starring all of Thomas, really introduces this female
figure into main dream culture, although all of Thomas, while
she did play that original flapper, would soon be overshadowed
(14:06):
by Clara Bow who's nineteen seven It Girl really defined
um who who these women would want to be, right, Yeah,
we still I mean we still use the term it
girl for for young Starlett and it was just sexual allure, yes,
and and how everybody wanted it. And so it's interesting
how the films of the time really created this consumer
(14:31):
culture but also sort of used the consumer culture. So
he's really a cycle because they showed beautiful young women
on screen having a great time using such and such
brand of cigarettes or soap or whatever. It's like, don't
you want to be like this woman? And so people
would go out and participate in these flapper contests and
pageants and stuff that you'd win something if you were
(14:54):
the one who looked most like the starlett in the movie. Um,
and one flapper. The real life flapper that we have
to talk about is Zelda Fitzgerald. Poor Zelda, Zelda. UM sad,
sad life. She did have a sad life, but at
first it was pretty glamorous. Um. She was a debutante
in Alabama where she met f Scott Fitzgerald, and those
(15:18):
two became just the couple, jure, right, the golden couple. YEA, parties, drinking, drinking, um,
traveling around the world and um. It was interesting. There
was a shift around the time that Zelda and f
Scott started to become so popular, which was with the
publication of This Side of Paradise. Um, there was a
(15:42):
shift in magazine content from just general news articles to
all of a sudden, you have this surge in personal profiles.
So even among more um, high minded media, not just
magazines like Variety. UM, you see this shift from just
general news and information to more celebrity and self obsession.
(16:08):
And part of that obsession was with the fashion of
the time, which I mean that's one of the most
easily identifiable eras in terms of fashion because you have.
You go from having high necked clothes and with the
with the hem line touching the floor and having very
sensible shoes and your long hair tied up in a
bun like like the Gibson girls of the time exactly.
(16:29):
Um yeah, all of a sudden it became all about
straight shifts. You know, some were sparkly. If you're going
out dancing, the hem line was cut so that would
be easier to dance. You're showing off your bare arms,
you're not wearing dark wool stockings. You're putting on your
your silken hose right, and you might even roll down
your your hosiery below the knees to help accommodate dancing.
(16:53):
And the straight cut dresses of the time also made
it easier for any young woman, no matter whether she's
rich or poor, to make her own flapper fashion. Whereas
with those you know, more elegant Gibson girl kind of outfits,
it was it was definitely more restricted to the middle
and upper classes. And we can't forget the hair. Oh yeah,
(17:17):
the hair is such a big deal. Everybody starts chopping
their hair off and like slicking it down and having
those two little curls that came out of the side
and then putting a cloth chat on top. That's right,
and on a side. Note. Yeah, this is also the
time when while yes, plenty of women were still making
their own dresses at home, but you also have ready
made clothes becoming more of the standard. And because of that,
(17:40):
this is when sizing comes into play, which is still
such a massive frustration in women's fashion. Um. But but
standard sizing starts happening. And then you also have, uh,
the popularization of dieting, right, because people want to be
a two instead of a six or whatever, and they
want to fit in the lower numbers, and that thin
(18:00):
boyish figure was in Women would even buying their breasts
just to make sure that they didn't have that that
hourglass shape of the Gibson girls. They didn't want to
be bouncing around there dancing, right, just like an early
sports bra basically um. And even down to the shoes,
they wore tea straps and buckled heels that were low
enough to accommodate dancing. Um. But this was also the
(18:24):
time when we started wearing bras instead of corsets, but
not without um some people kind of freaking out about
the implications of women not wearing corsets anymore. This is
This is a pretty intense example from Leonard floor Sheim,
who was the president of the Corset and Brazier Association.
In nineteen one, he wrote an article titled the Evils
(18:48):
of the No Corset fat in which he used racial
stereotypes to persuade middle and upper class white women that
going corsetless was much the same as going wild. My goodness, Leonard,
how hateful that is horrifying? Yeah, just gee, you layoff. Yeah,
but the flappers did not give a about Leonard floorsche
(19:08):
You were not given to giving hoots, that's right. But
Leonard Floorsheim, of course, was not the only um adult
non flapper who was really concerned about these young women
and moral implications of their lifestyles. I mean parents of
the day, not only we're freaking out about jazz. There's
this one one article that we found I think in
(19:30):
uh it might have been in Harper's Um, but the
title was something along the lines of this jazz put
the sin in syncopatient. Yes, And these flappers were listening
to jazz music and dancing to all this this new
music and uh, smoking cigarettes and petting in backseats of
cars and parents, Oh man, they didn't know what to do,
(19:54):
but um. Ellen Wells Page in December wrote a Flappers
Appeal to parents, which Caroline you aptly describe as the
jazz age version of parents. Just don't understand, that's the
most It's like such a whiny. It totally reminds me
of some melodramatic, whiney young woman who's just like, oh goodness,
(20:18):
times of changing, and we need guidance from you. You
just have to understand that we're different. We need your support.
Right At first, she starts out explaining differences among flappers. Um,
and apparently there were three main categories. I had no
idea flappers, the semi flapper, which ellen Wells Page, the
author describes herself as one of those because she didn't
really smoke very many stings. Is like, this is like
(20:40):
hipsters who want emit their hipsters. Right, I'm not a hipster.
I just dressed like this. I don't know to hang
out at these places. I don't know that much. Just like,
just because I dressed like a flapper doesn't mean I
have one. I'm only a semi flapper. But then they're
from the semi flapper. You have just the standard flapper,
and then there is the super flapper who just I mean,
I don't know if she ever even came home. She's
(21:01):
just riding around in cars for days, drinking bathtub does
she had the bathtub bathtubs in in the car going crazy.
She never took off that close chat, but I did
like her observation that petting is gradually growing out of
fashion through being overworked, which seems to apply to me.
That that making out essentially was just that people were
(21:21):
doing it so often in so many back seats that
there it was just becoming a little just like, who
does that anymore? Well? She also she also wrote about
jazz as if jazz were something that would eventually go
out of style. She's like, yeah, we're listening to it now,
but that's only until it's not cool anymore. How little
she knew, how olda she knew. But she did end
(21:41):
up appealing to parents to to understand and embrace the
flapper lifestyle and provides some kind of guidance instead of
just rebuking um all of the flapper ways, although at
one point she she uh encourages father's to quote make
love to their daughters it's a figure. It was totally
(22:04):
a figure spege um. But I think that only h yeah,
the only hammer's holm the just the drama because there
I mean, even though this is one essay that we're
talking about, this was really Ellen Wells Pages essays sums
up just the I don't know that everybody's computery. Everything's changing.
You just got to hold on for the ride. But
(22:25):
it's only speaking of of using making love. It's so different.
It meant something very different than it does now. And
that phrase I was I first found it in Um
the Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, for which she
want a Pulletzer Prize. She read in n and she
was the first woman, in fact to win a Pulletzer prize. Yeah,
(22:47):
another example of that, that new woman emerging. So I
don't know, to me, the flapper, the place of flappers
in American history isn't so much about feminism because she's
sort of is uh, this offshoot of the new woman.
She kind of takes the social benefits that new women were,
um were earning, and but really just kind of ignores
(23:10):
all the heavy stuff and has a good time. So
I kind of consider flappers as the first real bachelor's
in American society, because bachelor's, the whole bachelor culture is
generally a political and they're just enjoying their their single dom,
which is what flappers were doing. Well, I mean it's
so think of teenage culture now, yeah, it's it's the
(23:32):
same thing. I mean, I mean, not that there aren't
teenagers who are interested in you know, learning and politics
and stuff, but but that whole pop culture and I
think that yeah again, like flappers too, were one of
the first big examples of how pop culture can influence
those trends and that kind of back and forth cycle
that you mentioned between you know, the seeing things on
(23:52):
screen and then mimicking them in real life and then
you know, screen taking cues from your life and it
goes around and around and a giant vat of consumer culture. Um,
and now we're in a recession. And speaking of recessions,
on October, stock market crashed and the Flapper Party came
(24:13):
to a close. Right on that, right, but those major
ideas of you know, the the new women had had
earned their freedom or less, scarts stayed relatively short, cars
were still on the road. Yeah, so good for you
flapper women. So I hope that you have enjoyed this
(24:33):
little historical insight into the role of flappers. And then
next time, you know, if you're uh thinking of way
ahead about Halloween next year, um, or next time you
see the flapper costumes, just remember there's more. There's more
to flappers than just fringe and cigarette holders, exactly a
lot more like haircuts, right and movie watching. So if
(24:58):
you have anything you'd like to send our way about
flappers in your take on them, Mom, Steve al stepworks
dot Com is the address, and I've got an email
here from Bayla in response to our podcast on Trailblazing Lesbians,
and she writes, I wanted to mention Dr Dorothy Anderson,
who was my grandmother's college roommate at Mount Holyoke in
(25:20):
the nineteen twenties. Andy, as she was known, never came out,
but she also never married, and she routinely wore men's
suits and was generally seen as very masculine or butch
Andy went on to identify and to develop the first
treatments for cystic fibrosis. My mother once asked my grandmother
whether she had ever realized that Andy was probably a
lesbian and my fairly proper grandmother responded, Oh, I think
(25:42):
she had a boyfriend once. Anyway, there was a family
legend that Andy sometimes tagged along on my grandmother's dates
to sit at the table nearby and inspect the young
men courting her friend. In later life, Andy kept a
small recreational farm in upstate New York where my mother
and her siblings all spent summers growing up. And as
Andy had no children of her own, and she left
the farm to my aunt when she died. While Andy
(26:03):
was not publicly known as a lesbian in her lifetime,
we firendly believe that she was gay and that her
close friendships with my mother's family constituted her own surrogate
family's interesting bit of history. I have an email from
Damien in response to our Bisexual Men podcast, and he
said that you may be interested to learn that there
(26:24):
is another designation gaining slow recognition amongst individuals who can
feel both deep emotional and sexual connections to those of
both sexes. The term is homo sexual and awkward contradiction,
indicating a postmodern perspective on sexuality, wherein the individual finds
themselves not driven by sexual motivations and attractions, but by
characteristics and traits of the genderless individual. Of course, the
(26:47):
concept is not easily understood. Yes, it has made my
own romantic, personal and social life more awkward than perhaps
my gay, heterosexual, or even bisexual counterparts. Most people read
it with both fear and maybe been a bit of disgust,
as though I'm itching to potentially get with everything that moves,
or that I could just suddenly switch at any time.
Of course, I do recognize a good looking man or
(27:08):
woman in the room. In reality, however, real attraction begins
for me not as sexual at all, but as an
emotional and intellectual connection. Only after identifying someone as a
potential mental partner have I been truly interested in exploring
a potential physical side. Thanks so thanks to all of
you who have written in at mom stuff at how
stuff works dot com, and as always, you can hit
(27:29):
us up on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at
mom Stuff Podcasts, and you can check out the blog
during the week and read the article how Flappers Work
by Hey me that girl there yep me at how
stuff Works dot com. You're a regular billow be sure
(27:51):
to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most
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(28:13):
are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff mom never told you?
From house stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Caroline and I'm Kristin. So Kristen. Let's
(00:21):
blouse hip Hellen. Yeah, twenty ones can do. Wait. I
don't even know if that's one of the thing it
is nurts. You know what I hate on a date
A bunch of cherry smashes. Yeah, but a bunch of
my friends are biscuits though. Biscuits. Yeah, they don't like
cherry smashes. Okay, if people haven't guessed by now, we're
(00:41):
talking in slapper slang. Flapper eve yes, um of all
the slang. While you know, today's generation has text speak
like walls and uh, adorms, toasts, adorms, toasts, jelly uh,
we have nothing on flapper slang. Yeah, it really is
(01:05):
unrecognizable because at least tech speak, you kind of it's
abbreviations of things you can kind of figure it out.
But flapper speak, I mean they have dictionaries so that
people like us can understand what the heck they were
talking about. So why don't we explain a little bit
of what we were talking about. For instance, what is
let's blouse hip pound me that means let's go person
who likes to drink hooch um. And if you are
(01:26):
a biscuit, that means that you are a pettible flapper,
which means that people probably want to kiss you on
the mouth. But speaking of kisses on the mouth, if
you give cherry smashes, that means you have feeble kisses,
right and nerts means I am amazed starts I might
(01:48):
adopt that one actually, um. And uh, if you have
gotten a divorce recently, guess what you're out on? Borow
it's the bunk, which means I doubt that, Oh you
doubt that I'm out on pearl. Yeah, you're too young
for them. Uh. So today, yes, we're going to talk
about flappers and not just fringy Halloween costumes and Charleston,
(02:14):
but actually who these young women were and uh, what
was going on to to to spur these these zany
gals who talked in all this jib jam, all these
changes in society and in dress links and hair links
and everything. It came from a place and all of
(02:34):
this came about after World War One ended. Yes, Um,
all these terrible things were happening, um, but all of
a sudden, society started getting better. Um, even though so
many people had died in World War One and a
flu outbreak millions of people died. Oh yeah. In in
World War One we have a worldwide and estimated thirty
seven million deaths and injuries. And in the nineteen eighteen
(02:58):
Spanish flu pandemic right on the heels of World War One,
twenty to forty million deaths. So after this we see
this huge economic surge and significant social change. Yeah. And
kind of this notion for for younger people, um, whose
peers might have gone off to war and not come
back or caught the flu and not recovered. It's notion that, hey,
(03:21):
you know what, life is pretty short and unpredictable, and
we'd better have a dang all good time, right, And
not to mention that while all those men were out
at war, um, a lot of educational and employment opportunities
open for women, so they were they were jumping in
the game. Yeah. Uh. And we should talk about two
(03:42):
significant pieces of legislation the past in nineteen twenty, and
that is the eighteenth Amendment, also known as the Volstead Act,
which outlawed booze and kicked off prohibition. And then in
August of nineteen twenty, we have the passage of the
nineteenth Amendment give women the vote rights. All these crazy
(04:02):
things are happening. Women are running around voting. Alcohol is
driven underground. You have to knock on doors and they
open little split and you have to say a password
if you want booze wants a bathtub gin Yeah, sounds
like a stomach problem with happen or a good time
on the dance floor. That's true. But yeah, so other
things that were going on during this time. It really
(04:23):
affected the way people thought, hung out with each other, interacted. UM.
The first radio broadcast aired in nineteen twenty November. UM
and more and more people are going to the movies
each week, so you know, everybody's seeing these pop culture
representations of young people and it sort of creates this cycle.
But we'll get to that in a little bit. UM.
(04:45):
And thanks to and this is Man. These are quite
nice percentages in today's economic climate. The GDP at the
time was growing at a rate of four point eight
percent annually, and unemployment was hovering at a round three. Yeah,
so a lot of people had more money than they
had previously had. They were earning a lot more money,
(05:06):
and more people were moving to cities. So you had
this rise of this young culture that had more money
and more leisure time because they had things like refrigerators
and vacuums, and they had far more mobility. Car ownership
from nineteen nineteen to nineteen twenty nine, ten years, jumped
from six point eight million to a hundred and twenty
(05:28):
two million. Suddenly people had cars, and that was a
huge force behind this, uh, the emergence of teenage culture
and flappers, as well of women being able to get
behind the wheel and drive off to who knows where,
maybe park for a for a petting session. Yeah, umpily,
(05:52):
you did um well, And then yeah, you you mentioned
dating culture, teenage culture. This definitely changed how how young
people courted one another. Instead of the young man coming
into the parlor and sitting across the room from his beloved,
he would just you know, drive up outside her stoop
and honk the horn and she'd be like, pizza mama,
and you know, say some slang that I wouldn't understand.
(06:14):
She'd be like, this guy's really billow, which means he
lives fast and spends money freely. Yeah, we're gonna go
Barney mug is that courtship and our petting, oh man.
And then their parents would just blanche and wring their hands.
Yeah they were, oh dear, something terrible is going to see.
But I was interested to see that, um because because
(06:35):
I would have assumed that at the time, etiquette may
even such as Emily Post, would have said, hey, you
know what, ladies, this is not appropriate for you to drive. Uh,
don't don't get into cars with men. But pretty soon after, um,
like early in the nineteen twenties, Emily Post officially said, hey,
you know what, it's fine for women to drive by themselves.
(06:56):
Pretty early on the etiquette queen is telling that it's okay.
There was obviously, there was no stopping the emergence of
this new woman. Yeah, all of a sudden, young women
weren't tied to these lives of piety and domesticity. They
didn't immediately go into being from someone's daughter to being
someone's wife and taking care of a household. They were
pursuing education and employment. They were consuming all types of media,
(07:19):
reading a lot of magazines, books, going to movies, listening
to the radio, and yeah, they're pretty smart. Girls knew
a lot about a lot. Well, it seems like that that,
like you said hereing the um the reading of books, magazines,
going to the the movies, uh, listening to the radio. It
was that real emergence of mainstream pop culture that everyone
could kind of start partaking it. At the same time
(07:42):
that we have the rise in these um in these trends,
in this shift in attitude, um. And to describe the
new woman, who is we should differentiate the new woman
from the flapper because the new woman is a little
bit more of that um or politically liberated, sort of
like a Margaret Mead character. Anthropologist um and Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
(08:08):
who published magazine called The Forerunner, described the new woman
thus Lee. She says here she comes running out of
the prison and off the pedestal, chains off, crown off,
halo off. Just a live woman, live woman, sparkling with
electricity and sequence because she's a flapper. Um. Yeah. The
(08:29):
and we also have to differentiate between uh, these new
feminists knew knew, the new woman and suffragists because you
had the older generation really fighting for the vote. They
finally achieved, achieved what they've been fighting for for so long.
But then you have the Flappers and the New Woman
who were sort of looked down upon by some of
(08:50):
their suffragist role models as just like these kids just
want to have a good time. Look at all we
fought for and they're just running around in cars going
to petting parties. Right where is um? The suffrage movement stopped,
kind of stopped at that right to vote and kind
of wanted everything to the status quote to remain in
terms of being a wife, being a mother, and taking
(09:12):
care of the domestic sphere. But the New Woman wanted
to really challenge those gender roles, right. Professor Catherine Lavender said, Uh,
they meaning the Flappers and the and the New Woman,
they reacted against the emphasis in the woman movement on
female nurturance, selfless service, and moral uplift. They were they
were doing good things, they thought, but they were having
(09:33):
a good time while they did it. Right, And there
was also this idea of uh, sexual freedom being equated
with economic freedom and those going hand in hand, which
again the suffrage movement was certainly not so much about
sexual politics, right, and not everybody was very supportive of
the New Woman. Professor Samuel Holmes was quoted in The
(09:56):
New York Times of saying that women who attend college,
there by developing an interest in a career rather than children,
were harming the race, and that maybe eventually this would
calm down and they'd all go back home and have babies. Sorry,
Professor Holmes did not work that way. The depression amount
of ruined everybody's good time. But we still kept the
keys to the car um. Yeah. The the New York Times,
(10:19):
it really would just uh did not want to to
give the Flapper much credit for anything. This is from
in nine, which is after once that the Flapper has
really become a part of the popular culture. They write
that the Flapper had established the feminine right to equal
representation in such hitherto masculine fields of smoking, drinking, swearing, petting,
(10:43):
and disturbing the community. Piece. Yeah, very snarky New York
Times snarky. You're like, good for you women, you are
equally annoying and um. And that's the thing though about
the Flapper is that, yes, she was very focused on
on doing what she liked. Whether that meant that she
was kind of crossing those bounds into more masculine territories
(11:04):
of smoking and drinking and other things like that. But
she wasn't as she didn't really care so much to
start any kind of gender revolution. She just really wanted
to have a good time and if that meant, you know,
stepping on some gin while she did it, okay, having
a cigarette, putting finger waves in her hair, and really
focusing on looking good, right and having a fantastic time exactly. Um,
(11:31):
so I didn't. I wasn't aware of where the word
flapper came from, but apparently it's it was a word
that was borrowed from British slang meeting just a young woman.
But in nineteen fifteen, writer HL Lincoln described this new
sort of female identity that was emerging in the US,
and it's an identity kind of full of contradictions. So
this woman or this young woman is innocent but smart,
(11:55):
and she consumes modern media like movies, music and magazines
like we talked about that she's supposed to, I mean
willingly to sexy or racy material, but she's not sullied
by it, right, she doesn't. Uh. He writes that she
saw damaged goods without batting an eye and went away
wondering what the row over it was all about? Right,
which damaged goods we referenced in our sex education podcast
(12:19):
and what was damaged goods? Caroline? It was all about
the dangers of having sex. Right. It was the first
sex said movie that was really produced in the United States,
all about the soldier who contracted syphilis, passed onsitive baby,
and then killed himself. So kind of you can see
how that movie could be kind of controversial. But the
(12:40):
Flapper was like, Hey, I'm so good. So I think
a good way to differentiate them between that new woman
UH might be in the form of media. Consumer For instance,
the new woman would be all about the textbooks and
the pamphlets and more, the more actually minded literature of
(13:02):
the day, whereas the Flappers media was all just give me,
give me movies, give me magazines, give me tabloids about
Clara Beaux, all that stuff. Vanity Fair editor Frank crowin
Shield in nineteen fifteen characterized the Flapper UH saying that
his dinner companion, Yeah, this is interesting this quote. He said,
(13:24):
his dinner companion was very well informed. I put it
down naturally enough to wide reading. It couldn't all come
from experience their little bodies wouldn't hold so much so
thanks because she couldn't possibly like, you know, have life
experiences and learn all that stuff. But you know, it
was clear that these women were people all over characterized
(13:45):
them as as big readers and wanted to experience a
lot of stuff. And then in nine twenty, the movie
The Flapper starring all of Thomas, really introduces this female
figure into main dream culture, although all of Thomas, while
she did play that original flapper, would soon be overshadowed
(14:06):
by Clara Bow who's nineteen seven It Girl really defined
um who who these women would want to be, right, Yeah,
we still I mean we still use the term it
girl for for young Starlett and it was just sexual allure, yes,
and and how everybody wanted it. And so it's interesting
how the films of the time really created this consumer
(14:31):
culture but also sort of used the consumer culture. So
he's really a cycle because they showed beautiful young women
on screen having a great time using such and such
brand of cigarettes or soap or whatever. It's like, don't
you want to be like this woman? And so people
would go out and participate in these flapper contests and
pageants and stuff that you'd win something if you were
(14:54):
the one who looked most like the starlett in the movie. Um,
and one flapper. The real life flapper that we have
to talk about is Zelda Fitzgerald. Poor Zelda, Zelda. UM sad,
sad life. She did have a sad life, but at
first it was pretty glamorous. Um. She was a debutante
in Alabama where she met f Scott Fitzgerald, and those
(15:18):
two became just the couple, jure, right, the golden couple. YEA, parties, drinking, drinking, um,
traveling around the world and um. It was interesting. There
was a shift around the time that Zelda and f
Scott started to become so popular, which was with the
publication of This Side of Paradise. Um, there was a
(15:42):
shift in magazine content from just general news articles to
all of a sudden, you have this surge in personal profiles.
So even among more um, high minded media, not just
magazines like Variety. UM, you see this shift from just
general news and information to more celebrity and self obsession.
(16:08):
And part of that obsession was with the fashion of
the time, which I mean that's one of the most
easily identifiable eras in terms of fashion because you have.
You go from having high necked clothes and with the
with the hem line touching the floor and having very
sensible shoes and your long hair tied up in a
bun like like the Gibson girls of the time exactly.
(16:29):
Um yeah, all of a sudden it became all about
straight shifts. You know, some were sparkly. If you're going
out dancing, the hem line was cut so that would
be easier to dance. You're showing off your bare arms,
you're not wearing dark wool stockings. You're putting on your
your silken hose right, and you might even roll down
your your hosiery below the knees to help accommodate dancing.
(16:53):
And the straight cut dresses of the time also made
it easier for any young woman, no matter whether she's
rich or poor, to make her own flapper fashion. Whereas
with those you know, more elegant Gibson girl kind of outfits,
it was it was definitely more restricted to the middle
and upper classes. And we can't forget the hair. Oh yeah,
(17:17):
the hair is such a big deal. Everybody starts chopping
their hair off and like slicking it down and having
those two little curls that came out of the side
and then putting a cloth chat on top. That's right,
and on a side. Note. Yeah, this is also the
time when while yes, plenty of women were still making
their own dresses at home, but you also have ready
made clothes becoming more of the standard. And because of that,
(17:40):
this is when sizing comes into play, which is still
such a massive frustration in women's fashion. Um. But but
standard sizing starts happening. And then you also have, uh,
the popularization of dieting, right, because people want to be
a two instead of a six or whatever, and they
want to fit in the lower numbers, and that thin
(18:00):
boyish figure was in Women would even buying their breasts
just to make sure that they didn't have that that
hourglass shape of the Gibson girls. They didn't want to
be bouncing around there dancing, right, just like an early
sports bra basically um. And even down to the shoes,
they wore tea straps and buckled heels that were low
enough to accommodate dancing. Um. But this was also the
(18:24):
time when we started wearing bras instead of corsets, but
not without um some people kind of freaking out about
the implications of women not wearing corsets anymore. This is
This is a pretty intense example from Leonard floor Sheim,
who was the president of the Corset and Brazier Association.
In nineteen one, he wrote an article titled the Evils
(18:48):
of the No Corset fat in which he used racial
stereotypes to persuade middle and upper class white women that
going corsetless was much the same as going wild. My goodness, Leonard,
how hateful that is horrifying? Yeah, just gee, you layoff. Yeah,
but the flappers did not give a about Leonard floorsche
(19:08):
You were not given to giving hoots, that's right. But
Leonard Floorsheim, of course, was not the only um adult
non flapper who was really concerned about these young women
and moral implications of their lifestyles. I mean parents of
the day, not only we're freaking out about jazz. There's
this one one article that we found I think in
(19:30):
uh it might have been in Harper's Um, but the
title was something along the lines of this jazz put
the sin in syncopatient. Yes, And these flappers were listening
to jazz music and dancing to all this this new
music and uh, smoking cigarettes and petting in backseats of
cars and parents, Oh man, they didn't know what to do,
(19:54):
but um. Ellen Wells Page in December wrote a Flappers
Appeal to parents, which Caroline you aptly describe as the
jazz age version of parents. Just don't understand, that's the
most It's like such a whiny. It totally reminds me
of some melodramatic, whiney young woman who's just like, oh goodness,
(20:18):
times of changing, and we need guidance from you. You
just have to understand that we're different. We need your support.
Right At first, she starts out explaining differences among flappers. Um,
and apparently there were three main categories. I had no
idea flappers, the semi flapper, which ellen Wells Page, the
author describes herself as one of those because she didn't
really smoke very many stings. Is like, this is like
(20:40):
hipsters who want emit their hipsters. Right, I'm not a hipster.
I just dressed like this. I don't know to hang
out at these places. I don't know that much. Just like,
just because I dressed like a flapper doesn't mean I
have one. I'm only a semi flapper. But then they're
from the semi flapper. You have just the standard flapper,
and then there is the super flapper who just I mean,
I don't know if she ever even came home. She's
(21:01):
just riding around in cars for days, drinking bathtub does
she had the bathtub bathtubs in in the car going crazy.
She never took off that close chat, but I did
like her observation that petting is gradually growing out of
fashion through being overworked, which seems to apply to me.
That that making out essentially was just that people were
(21:21):
doing it so often in so many back seats that
there it was just becoming a little just like, who
does that anymore? Well? She also she also wrote about
jazz as if jazz were something that would eventually go
out of style. She's like, yeah, we're listening to it now,
but that's only until it's not cool anymore. How little
she knew, how olda she knew. But she did end
(21:41):
up appealing to parents to to understand and embrace the
flapper lifestyle and provides some kind of guidance instead of
just rebuking um all of the flapper ways, although at
one point she she uh encourages father's to quote make
love to their daughters it's a figure. It was totally
(22:04):
a figure spege um. But I think that only h yeah,
the only hammer's holm the just the drama because there
I mean, even though this is one essay that we're
talking about, this was really Ellen Wells Pages essays sums
up just the I don't know that everybody's computery. Everything's changing.
You just got to hold on for the ride. But
(22:25):
it's only speaking of of using making love. It's so different.
It meant something very different than it does now. And
that phrase I was I first found it in Um
the Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, for which she
want a Pulletzer Prize. She read in n and she
was the first woman, in fact to win a Pulletzer prize. Yeah,
(22:47):
another example of that, that new woman emerging. So I
don't know, to me, the flapper, the place of flappers
in American history isn't so much about feminism because she's
sort of is uh, this offshoot of the new woman.
She kind of takes the social benefits that new women were,
um were earning, and but really just kind of ignores
(23:10):
all the heavy stuff and has a good time. So
I kind of consider flappers as the first real bachelor's
in American society, because bachelor's, the whole bachelor culture is
generally a political and they're just enjoying their their single dom,
which is what flappers were doing. Well, I mean it's
so think of teenage culture now, yeah, it's it's the
(23:32):
same thing. I mean, I mean, not that there aren't
teenagers who are interested in you know, learning and politics
and stuff, but but that whole pop culture and I
think that yeah again, like flappers too, were one of
the first big examples of how pop culture can influence
those trends and that kind of back and forth cycle
that you mentioned between you know, the seeing things on
(23:52):
screen and then mimicking them in real life and then
you know, screen taking cues from your life and it
goes around and around and a giant vat of consumer culture. Um,
and now we're in a recession. And speaking of recessions,
on October, stock market crashed and the Flapper Party came
(24:13):
to a close. Right on that, right, but those major
ideas of you know, the the new women had had
earned their freedom or less, scarts stayed relatively short, cars
were still on the road. Yeah, so good for you
flapper women. So I hope that you have enjoyed this
(24:33):
little historical insight into the role of flappers. And then
next time, you know, if you're uh thinking of way
ahead about Halloween next year, um, or next time you
see the flapper costumes, just remember there's more. There's more
to flappers than just fringe and cigarette holders, exactly a
lot more like haircuts, right and movie watching. So if
(24:58):
you have anything you'd like to send our way about
flappers in your take on them, Mom, Steve al stepworks
dot Com is the address, and I've got an email
here from Bayla in response to our podcast on Trailblazing Lesbians,
and she writes, I wanted to mention Dr Dorothy Anderson,
who was my grandmother's college roommate at Mount Holyoke in
(25:20):
the nineteen twenties. Andy, as she was known, never came out,
but she also never married, and she routinely wore men's
suits and was generally seen as very masculine or butch
Andy went on to identify and to develop the first
treatments for cystic fibrosis. My mother once asked my grandmother
whether she had ever realized that Andy was probably a
lesbian and my fairly proper grandmother responded, Oh, I think
(25:42):
she had a boyfriend once. Anyway, there was a family
legend that Andy sometimes tagged along on my grandmother's dates
to sit at the table nearby and inspect the young
men courting her friend. In later life, Andy kept a
small recreational farm in upstate New York where my mother
and her siblings all spent summers growing up. And as
Andy had no children of her own, and she left
the farm to my aunt when she died. While Andy
(26:03):
was not publicly known as a lesbian in her lifetime,
we firendly believe that she was gay and that her
close friendships with my mother's family constituted her own surrogate
family's interesting bit of history. I have an email from
Damien in response to our Bisexual Men podcast, and he
said that you may be interested to learn that there
(26:24):
is another designation gaining slow recognition amongst individuals who can
feel both deep emotional and sexual connections to those of
both sexes. The term is homo sexual and awkward contradiction,
indicating a postmodern perspective on sexuality, wherein the individual finds
themselves not driven by sexual motivations and attractions, but by
characteristics and traits of the genderless individual. Of course, the
(26:47):
concept is not easily understood. Yes, it has made my
own romantic, personal and social life more awkward than perhaps
my gay, heterosexual, or even bisexual counterparts. Most people read
it with both fear and maybe been a bit of disgust,
as though I'm itching to potentially get with everything that moves,
or that I could just suddenly switch at any time.
Of course, I do recognize a good looking man or
(27:08):
woman in the room. In reality, however, real attraction begins
for me not as sexual at all, but as an
emotional and intellectual connection. Only after identifying someone as a
potential mental partner have I been truly interested in exploring
a potential physical side. Thanks so thanks to all of
you who have written in at mom stuff at how
stuff works dot com, and as always, you can hit
(27:29):
us up on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at
mom Stuff Podcasts, and you can check out the blog
during the week and read the article how Flappers Work
by Hey me that girl there yep me at how
stuff Works dot com. You're a regular billow be sure
(27:51):
to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most
promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House stafforks iPhone
app has a ride. Download it today on iTunes, brought
to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready,
(28:13):
are you
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