Joshua Zeitz's Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern is a whirlwind tour of the 1920s paying particular attention to the women who broke free of the previous generation's Victorian restraints and desired to live and think independently. The Roaring Twenties was such a fascinating period filled with immense change, the Flapper being one of the byproducts of modernity. Zeitz's survey of the decade is eminently readable, and I found hard it to put down. He does go off on tangents, but everything pulls together in the end no matter in which direction he goes. He writes generally about the era, and any one of the topics could very well fill a book of its own, but the text is also filled with detailed information as well as anecdotal history that brings the 1920s to life.
I started marking passages of interest with turned down pages and little post it notes, but it was starting to get unwieldy, so I stopped. There's such a bounty of information here. Rather than remember all the small details it will be the general feel of the period that I think I take with me from this book, though there might be an interesting fact or two that sticks in my mind. It is divided into three sections, just as the subtitle says--the first discusses the flapper and her new way of dealing with the world, the second is about style and fashion and the last about America's new infatuation with celebrity status and Hollywood. And within the text Zeitz often turns to F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald who helped define the era. Actually the book begins and ends with the famous pair from their rise to fame and fortune and their tragic spiral downward, which pretty much reflected the period. It was a decadent time and one that couldn't really maintain it's sparkly fizz.
It's not known who coined the term flapper, though it likely came from a type of gown worn in prewar England known as "flapper dresses". They were made for gawky teenage girls with slender frames that helped cover their awkwardness.
"If historians still disagree about how and when the term came into vogue, by the early 1920s it seemed that every social ill in America could be attributed to the 'flapper'--that notorious character type who bobbed her hair, smoked cigarettes, drank gin, sported short skirts, and passed her evenings in steamy jazz clubs, where she danced in a shockingly immodest fashion with a revolving cast of male suitors. She was the envy of teenage girls everywhere and the scourge of good character and morals."
Rather than try to give an overview of everything I read (there's just too much material to do that), I think I'll share some of the things I found most interesting. For instance, thanks to industrialization society was changing quickly. More and more people were moving from the country to the cities, and life was becoming easier with the mass production of goods. After WWI America was a wealthy nation and it showed in most people's earnings, though unsurprisingly women made far less than their male counterparts. Although there was a gulf between the haves and have nots, this was perhaps the first time when people were able to buy superfluous goods. Welcome to the consumer age. It wasn't just that these things were available, but with the dawn of the age of advertising, people learned to desire what they didn't realize that they ever really needed. So, I realize most of this is Social Studies 101, but all the little pieces form a portrait of America in the 20s and explains why and how it all happened. I love this sort of social history. And while I knew much of this already it was interesting to see the broader picture and all the causes and effects.
Comparing Victorian attitudes to those of the 1920s was especially eye opening though not particularly surprising. In the Victorian era the sexes were often segregated and dating was unheard of. Men worked, women tended to the household. Men socialized at their clubs while women passed time in each others' homes. With so many women entering the workforce and living in large cities there was more opportunity for the sexes to intermingle and be alone together. Cars and the burgeoning popularity of bicycles meant they could get to out of the way places. Zeitz also suggests that since women earned less yet wanted to take advantage of the many free time entertainments (also something relatively new compared to the Victorian world) that there was a certain amount of physical give and take between men and women. Although women might be sexually active, most did so only with the men they eventually married. Flappers were not highly regarded by the feminists of the time who saw them as simply out for fun rather than trying to help pave the way for women's rights. And something I didn't know, the Ku Klux Klan were even critical of these modern women and would sometimes take matters in their own hands and mete out justice to those they deemed were acting inappropriately. In the early days of Hollywood starlets were demure and fresh faced. Hollywood itself was quite conservative compared to later standards, no doubt corrupted by the Flapper, which as they become increasingly popular in the public's eye they sought to portray on film.
A modern woman deserves a modern style of clothing and I think I would have been especially happy to remove the corset for good.
"Consider the daily torment experiences by a typical women in just getting dressed each morning. Whether the year was 1800 or 1900, whether she was fifteen years old or sixty, rich or middle class, married or unmarried, the representative American woman kicked off her ensemble with a one-piece foundation garment combining drawers and an undershirt, complete with built-in 'trapdoor'; then a tightly bound corset with drawstrings or metal clasps to contort the waist and midriff; next restrictive silk pads that slipped in above the hips and in the underarms to provide the illusion of more dramatic curves; then several layers of petticoats or a steel-and-wood frame crinoline to hold the skirt in proper shape; then a long-sleeved chemise; then underpants; then silk stockings and garters that fastened to the corset; and finally, the dress or skirt itself."
No wonder women were always fainting! Zeitz writes about designers Coco Chanel and Paul Poiret who were innovators in women's fashions by loosening things up and making them much more comfortable. And both men and eventually women were able to buy clothes ready made by the 20s. Ideas about women and how they should look and dress were shaped not only by the onslaught of glossy magazines filled with advertising but also by Hollywood, something that hasn't changed much in the last 90 years or so.
The frenzied living of that first quarter of the twentieth century couldn't last though. Between the stock market crash in 1929 and bank failures it was the beginning of the end for those decadent decades. Prosperous times were over and the economy floundered. A story that's all too familiar really. But the modern age was here to stay.
I plan on reading more about this fascinating period. Thanks to Sibylle for the heads up on Lucy Moore's Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties, which I'm in the process of trying to get through interlibrary loan (though would prefer to own my own copy). I recently bought Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties by Marion Meade. The Moore sounds like an even more general overview of the period but the Meade seems to concentrate on literary figures. And for the British version I have D.J. Taylor's Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London's Jazz Age to look forward to. I'm sure I might have one or two other books on my shelves as well. In any case the Zeitz was a great place to start.