These wild young women liked to party and wear scandalous clothes — for the sake of women’s liberation
The ‘It’ girl of the twenties had older generations clutching their pearls in dismay
“She was about nineteen,” writes F. Scott Fitzgerald, “slender and supple, with a spoiled alluring mouth and quick gray eyes full of a radiant curiosity.” The woman, Ardita Farnam, on a boat trip to Florida with her uncle, is at the center of Fitzgerald’s story “The Offshore Pirate,” which led off his popular, first short story collection, Flappers and Philosophers (1920). He goes on to describe her stockingless feet, which were perched on a nearby chair, “adorned rather than clad in blue-satin slippers which swung nonchalantly from her toes. And as she read, she intermittently regaled herself by a faint application to her tongue of a half-lemon that she held in her hand. The other half, sucked dry, lay on the deck at her feet and rocked very gently to and fro at the almost imperceptible motion of the tide.”
Though American women won suffrage in 1920, it hardly meant they were liberated from the strictures of polite society. In fact, the fight for the right to vote was long and fierce, and even after their landmark victory, women remained second-class citizens in most every way. Which is to say, a gamine teenage girl with a “spoiled” mouth splayed across two settees sucking the juice from a lemon with a book in one hand was a more radical image than it may now seem. But this was the flapper, a distinctly modern invention of the early 20th century, a repository for sweeping cultural anxieties about morality, sexuality, and freedom.
The flapper is famous for her style, not her substance, often remembered as an assemblage of accoutrements, a walking fashion statement who countered the dour wartime mood by ushering in fun, Gatsby style, in the interwar era. A no-bullshit descendent of the “Gibson Girl,” the late-19th- and early 20th-century feminine ideal, the flapper was identifiable by a few bold, unprecedented flourishes: makeup, for one, which became popular and portable in the 1920s; a boyish build; a bob; a drop-waist dress, and (in the movies, at least) a long cigarette holder.
But the history of the flapper goes back further than such pop narratives would have us believe. In her 2017 book Lost Girls: The Invention of the Flapper, historian Linda Simon traces the prehistory of the term, and positions the eventual emergence of these wild gals as the end of a generation-long cultural wrangling over female adolescence and female power.
Largely through increased access to public spaces where the boundaries of identity were being tested — namely, movie theaters and dance halls — girls were coming of age with exposure to a much broader range of influences than ever before.
Simon also deftly illustrates the ways that American and British society created the conundrum represented by the flapper. Early in the book, she writes about a 73-year-old Mark Twain, who boasted, “I collect pets: young girls — girls from ten to sixteen years old, girls who are pretty and sweet and naive and innocent — dear young creatures to whom life is a perfect joy and to whom it has brought no wounds, no bitterness, and few tears.” Twain exchanged flirtatious letters with the girls, whom he called his “angelfish.” Men like Twain, in addition to being downright creepy, were instrumental in perpetuating the cult of youth — impish, female youth, in particular, although Twain was also notably fixated on his own youth and adored the play Peter Pan when it came out on Broadway in 1905.
But the collective male lust for young girls created a cultural paradox. As Lorna Scott Fox sums it up in a Times Literary Supplement review of Lost Girls, “Having sexualized its schoolgirls and attributed subversive secrets to them, society wrung its hands: ‘Who were these new creatures, parents and educators asked, with urgency and alarm.’” (The term flapper actually originated as late-19th-century slang for a very young prostitute.)
Through new forms of social interaction and exposure to new forms of media, young women merged the cult of youth with the lust for freedom; they flouted convention and Prohibition-era restrictions and spent the decade learning to drink and dance in the speakeasies, cabarets, and jazz clubs of American cities. The flapper lifestyle was enshrined in endless fashion editorials, books, and films throughout the so-called Roaring Twenties, most notably The Flapper, starring ur-ingenue Olive Thomas. Stars like Clara Bow and Louise Brooks rose to fame on the look, and the version of femininity that it promised, a unique combination of innocence and savvy, good girl and bad girl. She was young enough to be curious about getting into a little trouble, but naughty enough not to get caught — or not to care if she did.
The flapper’s reign was as short as it was legendary. By 1929, journalist Mildred Adams was writing in the New York Times that, while she may have been the “it” girl, “this year, the flapper is as out of date as last year’s dance tunes.” Adams’s piece did what newspapers do every few years: said a dismissive farewell to one female trend and ushered in another. The “wild” girl who swore and smoked and drank would have to make room for a new, perhaps slightly more demure wave of young women. Of the flapper, Adams wrote, “Just as she had established herself firmly in the public mind as an enduring type, had set her mother and her grandmother at reducing their matronly proportions to approximate her straight young figure, had been immortalized in print and stylized in picture, it was suddenly discovered that her type wasn’t feminine in the least and that it was all very much against the laws of nature.” Then, alas, “she, too, discovered that she was only a fashion.”
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