I banked this post at 3QuarksDaily under the theory I would write about it later, but now is as good a time as any. It’s a link to a story in The Harvard Gazette about the Modern Girl Project, a historical project done at the University of Washington, Seattle that tracks the way the Modern Girl of the 1920s was a worldwide phenomenon.
The image of the 1920s flapper endures to this day: the frank gaze, the kiss curls and cropped hair, the slender figure, the painted eyebrows and bright red lips. In that era, the “It Girl” was It.
But the American It Girl was also the German neue Frauen, the Japanese moga, the Indian vamp, the Chinese modeng xiaojie, and the French garçonnes.
Iterations of the flapper around the world had in common an explicit eroticism and an uncommon power to challenge social conventions. In the interval between the world wars, her iconic image — with regional adjustments — appeared not just in the United States but in all five continents.
Fascinating to me because it’s a refutation of some underlying myths about feminism, the number one being that it’s a recent American affectation that has only just now started to spread internationally. I’ve been guilty of implying that myth myself. The more complicated truth is that feminism is a long-standing international movement with a fascinating history that moves in fits and starts, and is related to other progressive movements. Progress is made, the backlash begins, things go to hell and hopefully when the dust clears, things have gotten better and it’s time to restart the cycle. Flappers were something of a flash in the feminist pan, and by no means were they uncontroversial.
When American women won the right to vote in 1919, the logical question was, What next? Suffragists had the answer ready: full enjoyment of civil and domestic life for women, equal to that of men.
But suffragists found out that what was next was not much. It would be decades before American women gained anything like gender equality in the home, in the workplace, and in higher education.
And they faced another unsettling fact: Flappers were next. To the dismay of early feminists, these unruly daughters of feminism were driven by an apolitical appetite for clothes, boys, and the outward signs of freedom.
Taking swipes at the shallow-minded flappers is pretty much standard operating procedures in feminism; even Betty Friedan does it in her essay that was a run-up to The Feminine Mystique. I’m not sure what to make of that, though, because the huffy insinuation that flappers rolled back feminism through their lack of seriousness reminds me of nothing more than the same accusations being aimed at third wave feminists, who are routinely accused of being oversexed fluff-heads who are too busy enjoying our freshly won freedoms to worry about continuing the fight.
It might be true to an extent, but since I see these things as cyclical, I have to wonder if the “women party down with their new freedoms” part of the cycle isn’t a necessary one for a progressive movement to stick, and more importantly, move forward. Without the drinking, smoking, and most importantly, fornicating flappers pushing young women to grab ahold of the more sensual pleasures of life, how would the long-evolving sexual revolution of the 20th century get underway? And without more and more women actually going out and having Teh Sex, the need for more contraception and for abortion rights might not have been made so apparent as it became. Now we see how critical it is for women to be able to control their reproduction while still having sex, whereas the suffragists tended to think that reproduction was best controlled through unattainable and undesirable (for most women) abstinence. The shift from the abstinence focus to the contraception/abortion focus seems to me like it was shoved along by the flappers rolling up their skirts and rolling down their stockings. It’s no coincidence, in my opinion, that the generation that was known for the hip flask in their garter belts was the same ones that pushed for more sex education and funded the research for the birth control pill in their middle age. Which is simplifying the entire history of it, sure, but sometimes it helps to step back and look at the zeitgeist.
Third wave feminists seem to have the best of both worlds, the politically intellectual leanings of our blatantly feminist foremothers with the erotically charged party down attitude of the flappers. As a “member” of said wave, of course, my enthusiasm for us should be taken with a grain of salt. Still, I hope there’s something to my optimism on this front. The most recent incarnations of feminism seem racially diverse and definitely align themselves seamlessly with queer politics, even if we seem fluffier and lighter with our flapper-esque obsessions with sex and pop culture. Really, the generational language seems too confrontational and inaccurate to me—it’s more like spots on a continuum. The notion that it’s one generation vs. another irks me right now. I prefer to think that it’s more about how the winds are shifting this way and that, and if you happen to be standing in a certain place when the winds change, you’re more likely to go with it than someone standing somewhere else.
I’m nearly done with the book College Girls, which addresses the winding evolution of freedom for young women in some interesting ways, and reading into this project feeds into it. I’ll go into it at length later, but one thing that was on my mind today was the struggle to earn the right to smoke like men. It was corporate-directed and bad for women’s health, for sure, but I still couldn’t help but wonder if it’s rash to dismiss the entire struggle as nonsense. Under the long struggle of the suffragists, feminists got into the habit of making “equal but different” arguments. Women deserved the vote because women’s different take on politics would help the country. Women deserved education to be better at their god-given roles as men’s helpmeets. But when the flapper generation pushed for the right to smoke on campus, they didn’t decorate it with an argument that women should get this right to be better at being feminine. On the contrary, it was a pretty straightforward shove-it-up-your-ass argument, that women shouldn’t be deprived of a right that men enjoy unquestioned. Getting to the point where women were making demands for true equality instead of prettying it up by referencing patriarchal values was a necessary step, and for whatever reason, it was a step that was taken when women put their feet down and pulled their lighters out. Now that we know it’s bad for you, that’s a mixed blessing to say the least, but at the time, it was a strong display, in its way, of the radical possibilities of pleasure.
34 Responses to “The next step towards our goals was the Charleston”
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Part of the anti-flapper rhetoric was simply a generation gap of the most yawning type, the Victorian-Edwardian era suffragettes against the post-WWI era flappers. The Twenties really was the first decade where the now-typical expressions of “What’s the matter with kids today?” and “How can you listen to that ‘music’?” had their modern meaning. That there would be a generation gap between women is hardly surprising.
Of course there was a developing generation gap even before the war with younger women like Alice Paul and Sylvia Pankhurst (as well as her mother and sister before the war) pushing the envelope for women’s suffrage. Younger women were less interested in accepting the social conventions whether they were politically active or not. And exposure to working-class mores before the war as part of the Progressive Movement and during the war altered the behavior of middle-class women. The flapper’s public drinking had been common among working-class women before 1920, but was considered shocking because it involved middle-class women.
I think you’re right, histro, but the yawning generation gap issue becomes a political issue when it gets invested with political meaning, especially when one group of women is accusing another, rightly or wrong mind you, of not caring about their own rights.
God forbid that women actually USE their rights! Tsk tsk.
I also took an interest in reading about the link between smoking and agency for women. In my own research about women in the Irish anticolonial movement, I learned that smoking was a way for women to enter the public sphere. The male segregated smoking room of the 19th century was overturned by women smokers. When Irish women started smoking a particular brand aimed at women around 1908 they looked at it as an opportunity to join in conversation with each other and with men. Think about it: cigarettes and conversation follow naturally. Any smoker today can tell you that with all the bans on smoking when we are secluded outside we strike up conversations all the time. It was the same for women. Smoking gave them access to public debates about the nation. It wasn’t long before many other restrictions upon women’s behavior and participation in public life were challenged by women.
I’ll go into it at length later, but one thing that was on my mind today was the struggle to earn the right to smoke like men.
You might be a little young to remember the Virginia Slims “You’ve come a long way, baby” ads of the late 70s and early 80s, but they typically started with sepia-toned images of women in the teens and 20s trying to light up, only to have men come along and spoil their fun, and a modern woman dressed to indicate that she was doing whatever the suffragettes/flappers were doing when they were trying to light up (playing tennis, sailing, working), but proudly holding a cigarette.
Ah, corporate feminism.
When you really stop to think about flappers, it’s just astonishing how drastic a departure they were from centuries of approved female behavior and dress. And in such a short time after getting the vote. And Boomers like to think they were daring in the 60s for growing their hair.
Isn’t this conversation about a conflict just a holdover from patriarchy’s behavioral rules? It seem to me that it’s a patriarchal construct that the son must overtake the father, and that this conversation about young feminists having to be different from the previous fems just more of the same.
I’m kind of in the middle of both generations, and I don’t care what the Steinems or Friedans think, or what the Gen XY’s do, as long as we are all in it together. I think the differences are more contrived by the corporate media more than anything else–the same media that tries to sell the “feminism is dead” idea every ten years or so.
The anti-flapper backlash reminds us that only men are allowed to be vapid and mindless.
Speaking of which, I see that Will Farrell has yet another highly successful film. Can anybody imagine a female equivalent to Will Farrell being successful these days?
Rick,
It’ll be a while, I think, before society can get to the point where there’s parity between the genders in the realm of middle-to-lowbrow comedy, a la Will Farrell.
But there actually is progress being made on this front, too: look no further than Sarah Silverman on Comdey Central.
http://www.comedycentral.com/shows/the_sarah_silverman_program/index.jhtml
I went to the Modern Girl symposium back in March. Don’t have my notes with me, but will try to come back to the thread tonight to see if I can add anything.
The clash between the ideals of the “New Woman/suffragette” era and the “modern girl” wasn’t brought up by any of the speakers, but did take up a great deal of the question period, as the New Woman seemed to be the frame of reference for most of the audience.
Something that gelled for me a bit later was some of the class issues. One of the things that the Modern Girl did was obliterate many of the old distinctions. If you bobbed your hair, wore short skirts and applied cosmetics, it wasn’t strictly clear to an observer what social class you had been born into. The look was taken up by both the wealthy and the working class. And non-white women as well.
For all the flack the consumer culture gets for perpetuating a classist society, it does at least allow money to sever somewhat the ties to a person’s birth class.
Oh, it warms my heart (and as a women’s historian, makes me feel less irrelevant!) to see this historical work being incorporated so intelligently into a political conversation today. I agree with just about everything you’ve written. I actually think, if anything, that the generation gap was *more* pronounced then than now, but I could be wrong about that. But I totally agree that focusing on generational divides is not terribly productive, and is in fact quite reductive. Feminism in the 1960s and 1970s wasn’t nearly so monolithic as some would like to imagine; there was a wide diversity of opinions about issues such as sexual behavior and race/racism. Feminists of the second wave were certainly not all Betty Friedan cardboard cutouts. Even at the time, there was a perceived generation gap, though my research indicates that in many ways it was more perceived than real, in terms of people’s positions on issues.
p.s. Sorry if this ends up being double-posted; there was some sort of error when I hit submit last time.
The discussion of cycles (flappers following suffrage, and then more modern incarnations) might not hold up as well with your international examples. For instance, the “moga” era in Japan was in the 1920s, but it was totally distinct from the suffrage movement, which didn’t manage to win voting rights for women in Japan until after World War II, when Japan was occupied by the US.
You can’t really disentangle the history of 20th century feminism entirely from colonialism and the spread of Western culture and values, as troubling as it might seem in some cases. The “moga” in Japan and the “modeng xiaojie” in China are both hybrid words taken from English… Moga is just short for “modern girl” and xiaojie means “miss” or “young lady” — you can see the hybridization in the first half of that term. I don’t know as much about China, but in Japan and India both, moga and vamp are synonymous with the encroachment of “Western” ideas and a particular way of seeking the “cultural” gender liberation that’s discussed in the original post: by adopting fads for Western clothes, cigarettes, sexual liberation. The “vamp” if I’m not mistaken is more or less a Bollywood character — more the equivalent of “femme fatale” with a decidedly “Western influence” bent, trying to steal the good girl’s man.
I have to admit that it’s a double-edged sword in many ways; I’m certainly not against sexual liberation. In pre-colonial times there are plenty of other cultures that were far more sexually liberal and egalitarian, until the missionaries & the first wave of westernization clamped down. Part of the success of “moga” for instance was that it actually harkened back to older, looser cultural standards around sex in Japan. But it also was part and parcel of cultural colonization and in one sense *was* an export from the West, at least in the non-European cases mentioned. There is no doubt that feminism is a global movement that has taken many forms in many countries, but I don’t think this precise trajectory (”we win rights, then we explore them”) is necessarily any more universal than any other narrative about global feminism.
Two things bother me a bit about the flapper as an icon of female liberation:
1) the whole “girls gone wild” aspect of the flapper mystique
2) the “boyification” of the flapper - deemphasized waste, young, quite thin, bound down breasts. That isn’t an embrace of the female, but a rejection - almost a parody of masculine as far as women of the day could take it.
I do think the flapper did introduce some sensible trends which largely endure to the present day - gone were corsets, long skirts, stupid shoes, long-hair dictates, etc.
Keep in mind that these trends were mostly urban and middle class/upper class. If you were on a farm, they somewhat mattered if your community had train service to more major cities and educational institutions, but trends didn’t diffuse so thoroughly into the countryside as they do now. People wore the fashions, but not the lifestyles.
Overall, I see a couple of long-term time trends that collide with the Flapper:
1)Economic cycles (booming economies) seem to coincide with at least an increase in youth partying, as single young adults are self-sufficient and drawn into urban areas.
2)The women who bore the flapper generation were themselves the product of the “Gay 90s” who briefly rebelled and then regressed. The flappers, in turn, settled into lives much like those of their mothers as the depression arrived. They bore the women who headed to the cities and riveted warships and partied the war away otherwise (lots of hooking up going on then). These women again “settled down” with returning GIs into traditional male-centered families, and wondered what they did wrong when their daughters did the same in the 1960s as they had as the 1940s, without the whole WWII “excuse”. Eventually, we got preachy baby boomers and empowerful women stripping in daytona beach spring break bacchanales.
Amanda - you mean Betty Friedan, right? You wrote “Friedman.”
Ms Kate - I’m not so sure that it tracks with the business cycle as much as it does with immigration patterns, for example. Just as black participation in the labor force has traditionally increased during periods of low immigration (usually because of a booming European economy), I’d imagine that women’s labor force participation, and accompanying increases in income, happened the same way, at least earlier in the 20th century. And we all know that freedoms and discretionary income go hand in hand! Actually, it would take a lot more work to prove, but I’m just throwing it out there as an idea.
“We changed the world. I say we party.”
/buffyquotemangling
Perhaps not so much a rejection of the female as an assertion that femaleness needn’t require a sterotypically female body. I mean, think about it: a culture that views a woman’s role as a child bearer above all else is also one that will expect a “good” woman to have large breasts and wide hips. I think the flapper body type must have been very freeing, to those who could affect it.
Am I really the first person in this thread to bring up the classic short story “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”, where the country cousin gets duped into being fashionable by her Paris-Hilton-like rich cousin?
Also, to MsKate’s and outlier’s points, it’s pretty well-documented that periods of advancement in women’s rights tend to go along with a less-feminine body type being idealized. Think of Marily Monroe in the 1950s, Twiggy in the 1960s and 1970s, and then think of the womanly “glamazon” supermodels of the 1980s.
Rick:
Molly Shannon, maybe? Even she was a bit of a flash in the pan, though. I’ve always thought that Julia Louis-Dreyfus (sp?) was in that general area, as well.
That’s all I can think of, though, and neither one of them is a perfect analogy to Will Farrell.
But, my -probably uninformed- question goes this way:
Is feminism real or simply ’system`atic blowback, a secondary backlash, at ‘the patriarchy’; given the latter as ancient attitudinal mindset.
And should energies be directed at fomenting (loaded word, sorry),enabling and enacting what we think of as feminism or/and toward–
Obviating or neutralizing a diminishing but still prevalent cross-cultural mindset.
‘Obviating’ is the better word. An ‘end run’…sidestepping.
Or the making of …moot.
And how was ‘feminism’ EVER allowed, get enabled to rear it’s ….I was going to mis~say “…ugly head.”, but you know what I mean.
And the concept might inquire as to the beneficent influence of a globalized population (lots of folks…shopping) and communication (or lots of folks …talking, ?the internet)
But the how why whence and wherefores of this system are not clear…actually.
And I won’t get into the Gatherer-Hunter (alphabetical) Model, —it’s not very popular here— I know, but I bet it gave rise to a lot of this whole thing..
But it’s a good thing overall…happening and
It makes me kinda happy.
But young women living in the UK and Western Europe in the 1920’s also embraced “flapper-ism” in large numbers, and they didn’t have booming economies. In fact there was a lot of financial instability left over from WWI. So I’m not sure if it’s an economic uptick phenomenon.
Perhaps not so much a rejection of the female as an assertion that femaleness needn’t require a sterotypically female body. I mean, think about it: a culture that views a woman’s role as a child bearer above all else is also one that will expect a “good� woman to have large breasts and wide hips. I think the flapper body type must have been very freeing, to those who could affect it.
STEREOTYPICAL. Jesus wept. Yeah, we have breasts and hips because we conform to patriarchal stereotypes, that’s the ticket. If it weren’t for sexist expectations, I’d be a B cup for sure! Let me explain this to you very carefully: The assumption that a woman with big tits is more patriarchally inclined, more prone to childbearing, and more obedient to cultural roles is not a refreshingly original notion, okay? There may be things more misogynist than classing women’s physical body types as stereotypical or original, conformist or rebellious, but not many of them.
I think the flapper body type must have been very freeing, to those who could affect it.
Oh I see! Not the flapper costume, not the flapper habits, but the flapper body type. Here is a thought: how do you suppose a person affects a body type they do not currently have? Hint: begins with anor, ends with exia. Very big in the ’20s. Also breast-binding. Fun “non-stereotypical’ times, for sure.
Mnemosyne has a good point about the link between “androgynous” fashion such as Twiggy and the flappers and advances in women’s rights. A second correlation in women’s fashion is the frequent link between busty fashions and increases in child birth. I suspect this is more than a coincidence, though I wouldn’t claim that fashion, political rights, or baby booms cause each other.
Raincitygirl, the economy of the UK and Western Europe improved significantly during the mid-to-late twenties. There was uncertainty and a great deal of despair over the horrible losses of the war, but things were going well once the German inflation stopped.
What do we make of the recent trend of stick-thin bodies with no fat and no hips, yet breasts? This is an almost impossible body to achieve without a boob job. I think the standard is relaxing some the past several years as we’ve seen more of an acceptance of Latina and African American body types.
When viewed through the lens of the womens-wear fashion world, which is linked to the patriarchy by its very nature, I think it makes perfect sense that in its own patriarchy-lens-warped way, androgynous fashion was a herald of acceptance of new and different behaviors and roles for women. So it’s not a perfect example of feminism at work, but it is fascinating (and telling) to observe the culture reacting to, and partially accepting, new freedoms for women while still doggedly applying their own stamp on it by making it about what’s attractive (to whom?) and what’s not.
If our very body type is political, what can we do?
I think the flapper body type must have been very freeing, to those who could affect it.
Well, I suppose in a sense it’s “freeing” to happen to have whatever body type is currently fashionable; you lose the time sink of trying to figure out how to make your body type something it’s not. But that would work whether the favored body type is Twiggy or Marilyn Monroe; all that matters is whether you happen to be in the subset of women who have it.
Perhaps not so much a rejection of the female as an assertion that femaleness needn’t require a sterotypically female body.
Didn’t the previous generations use the corset, hoop skirt, and bustle for their fashions, which (in addition to being hideously uncomfortable) overemphasized the “hourglass” body type? In that sense, the straight, “androgynous” fashions would have been a conscious rejection of the “forced feminization” of previous fashions–ditto with bobbing the hair.
(And I don’t know about the prevalance of anorexia among flappers, but I have tried to dance the Charleston without a supportive bra, so I can see at least some level of “breast binding” as a purely practical matter.)
I wonder how much delayed childbearing had to do with all of this: the ability to delay childbearing due to the existance (however contraband) of birth control, the ability to support oneself in the booming US economy of the 20s and the female-worker situation of the 40s, and in the high unemployment economy of Germany in the 20s (where marriage and children simply wasn’t an option for many men and women)?
Thanks, alli. Fixed.
Ms Kate, I think that women wore masculine clothes for a simple reason—the concept of being liberated seemed masculine so they wore clothes to match the concept. It’s certainly imperfect, but that’s progress. Fits and starts.
Outlier, I take your point but remind you that the flapper body became just as mandatory an icon of beauty as the curvy one—and one that we know now is much harder to maintain, because you have to diet.
Sexual freedom and feminism have always gone together. The right-wingers noticed this a long time ago, which is why one of the foremost anti-pornography researchers, Dolph Zillmann, believes that it is “callous toward women” to be non-homophobic and to believe that women are not just baby-making machines. Remember, the first woman to run for president (illegally) was Victoria Woodhull, also known as a strong proponant of “free love”.
But sex-positive attitudes have also always caused a split in feminism - Woodhull was eventually shunned by her more straight-laced suffragist sisters, just as anti-porn feminists refused to associate with (or share a platform with) anti-censorship feminists in the ’90s.
So I don’t think it’s cyclic so much as something that all comes together at the same time. The backlash against female licentiousness sometimes comes in the form of talking about “dignity” for women, but it usually just turns into another social purity movement that forces women back into traditional roles.
Well, Jesus can dry his eyeballs because the words you have read did not mean what you have taken them to mean. There is a difference between is and is seen that way.
I’m GenX myself. But this does really seem to be a cycle.
One generation works for rights and the next enjoys them by breaking the remaining taboos, partying for a time and then starts working for the next wave of rights.
Women of my mother’s generation were the Second Wave. My generation was sneered at as pandering to men in everything. Now that we’re in our late 30s and 40s, we’re starting to get radicalized by what we’re seeing happening to us and our kids.
I mean, I was a library paraprofessional. Nice, pink collar job. Little pink collar paycheck. I went to truck driving school and I drive a semi now and make a real living. This would have been ridiculous to my mother at my age. And for all the my grandmother drove school buses and a coal truck (during the war), she’d have had kittens over it if she were still alive.
Driving a truck isn’t radical, IMO. But there are plenty who think it is.
The piece in the Harvard Gazette says “all five continents”– i find that a little weird, given that the aftermath of World War I meant a lot to Africans who fought in the war, who saw their countries change dramatically as their relationships with Europe changed. It always weirds me out when studies claim to be global and don’t include Africa and the African diaspora as part of their globe. I mean, if so much changed for European, American, Asian, and Australian women, it either changed a lot or didn’t, for some reason, for African women. either way, it ought to be part of the story.
Angelia, there is nothing like reality to drive the stake into the heart of the patricary’s central illusion, which is that at 18 God will issue you a man who will support you until the day you die if you just drink their Kool Aid re gender subjugation. Most of us who have hit 40 or close have finally put the finger down our throats on that one, even if we have not experienced divorce, layoffs, or disability of a spouse (or if said swain failed to materialize). There is nothing like a dearth of cash to realize that acting gender normative in every way does not pay the bills.
GenXer women supposedly pandered to men in everything? HUH?
Sounds like baby boomer put-downs of the next generation to me.
My teen years were full of women in shoulder pads, which are a symbolic representation of strength. My college years were full of women-organized activists groups. In my early adult years, I went to science fiction conventions as my big recreational activity, and a women from the LA Cornoners Office did lectures to help the would-be mystery and adventure writers. I think she also did the presentation on the possibilities of life on Europa, although that may have been another woman. Not to mention all the female professional writers and artists.
The actors on Buffy weren’t really teens, and I’m pretty sure Lucy Lawless is an Xer.
Was there some kind of drop in the female college grad rate during generation X, relative to men, I mean?
Who the hell says my generation was all about the boys? Hell, my male classmates were pissed off when the school newspaper underplayed the accomplishments of the girls’ sports teams and our academic feats. My generation, at least in my locale, has been pretty aware and against sexism. OTOH, it’s hell trying to fight older men who still see us as overly emotional girls when we’re well into adulthood. Maybe Gen X women were seen as less likely to fight for their rights because many males our own age treated us as equals without a fight, but “respect for elders” makes it hard to tell our professors, employers, etc, to stuff themselves, and our senior females see only that generational subordination?