Flappers

Flappers were modern adolescent girls and young women whose fashion and lifestyle personified the changing attitudes and mores of America and its youths in the 1920s. Magazines, books, and movies depicted the flapper with short, bobbed hair, powdered face, and painted puckered lips, and they dressed her in rolled stockings and scanty, low-waist dresses that emphasized a boyish figure. The flapper drank and smoked like men, and played and worked with men. She exuded an overt sexuality not only with her provocative clothing, but also in her actions: dancing to jazz, flirting with men, and attending petting parties unchaperoned.

The flapper was the subject of a great deal of controversy in public discussion. Many critics found her departure from the fashions and manners of the corseted women who came before her representative of a lapse in morality among the young and of an emerging generation gap. Indeed, the open sexuality and the sexual practices of the flapper generation were divergent from earlier generations: women coming of age in the 1920s were twice as likely to have had premarital sex as their predecessors. At a time when dating, the use of birth control, and frank discussion about sex was on the rise, the flapper became the symbol for the new sexual liberation of women. Portrayed as predominantly urban, independent, career-oriented, and sexually expressive, the flapper was hailed as an example of the New Woman.

Despite these stereotyped images, the flapper was not a revolutionary figure; rather she was an updated version of the traditional model of womanhood. Although she was freer in her sexuality and public conduct among men than her mother, the flapper had no intention of challenging the role of women in society or abandoning the path towards marriage and motherhood. On the contrary, like the rest of the middle-class younger generation that she exemplified, the flapper was conservative in her ultimate values and behavior. As contemporary suffragists and feminists complained, the flapper took up the superficial accoutrements of the emancipated woman, but she did not take up the ballot or the political pursuit for equal rights under the law.

In fact, the flapper and her lifestyle were reflective of mainstream American values and the emerging cult of youth that began to characterize popular culture in the 1920s. She represented the new vitality of a modern era. Advertisers used her image, combining youth and sex, to sell an array of goods, including automobiles, cigarettes, and mouthwash. In addition, although flapper fashion flourished to its fullest extent among the privileged and bohemian few, new innovations in the mass production of clothing made it possible for the fashion to have a wider influence in all of women's dress. Young teenagers could afford to follow fashion and made the style into a trademark among their peers. Even older women exposed to certain elements of flapper style in Sears Roebuck catalogs sported some of that look. While movie actresses like Clara Bow and personalities like Zelda Fitzgerald epitomized the flapper persona and philosophy, the flapper fad prevailed among middle-class youth, infusing its style and manner into mainstream American culture.

See also: Adolescence and Youth; Bobby Soxers; Manners; Teenagers; Youth Culture.

bibliography

Chafe, William H. 1991. The Paradox of Change: American Women in the 20th Century. New York: Oxford University Press.

Fass, Paula S. 1977. The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press.

Yellis, Kenneth A. 1969. "Prosperity's Child: Some Thoughts on the Flapper." American Quarterly 21: 44–64.

Laura Mihailoff