Ever since watching the silent movies of the 1920s and 30s during my university years in the 90s and 00s, I've been fascinated with the image of the flapper. I was enthralled by Louise Brooks in the seminal 'Pandora's Box' as she played carefree Lulu, moving through high society until it all comes tumbling down.
The image of the confident, fast talking young women draped in stylish dresses, who wore their hair short and bobbed and danced with abandon, surrounded by art deco glory fascinated me.
This book by Linda Simon looks at the evolution as well as the cultural and social history of the flapper and their impact on fashion, media, politics, LGBTQ+ and feminist rights. It is a meticulously researched journey through the chronological evolution of the flapper. After the stuffiness of the pre-war era, how do this massive cultural shift occur and why? It is all covered here in this fascinating book.
The book is a fascinating look at the mergence of the flapper.
I had always thought that the flapper came about after the first World War, as the lack of men and rights afforded to women through suffrage created confident young women. However, this books reveals that the term flapper was used as far back as London in the 1890s to describe thin, adolescent girls with long legs who were said to be 'flapping their butterfly wings.'
With time, this morphed into the flapper we associate with many Hollywood films of the time from the Roaring 20’s and Fitzgerald. Clara Bow, Colleen Moore and, of course, Louise Brooks all played silent movie sirens, flappers of dubious character who rebelled against the societal 'norms' and partook in hedonistic individualism and rampant consumerism. However, what we uncover is that flapper-dom was much more complex that this reductionist retelling.
It was a combination of Peter Pan (no, really), the Suffragettes, the freedom afforded by lack of men due to the tragedy of the Great War and the rise of dance halls mixed with the popularity of strong female leads in books that moulded the flapper as we see her today. The rise of fashion houses and makeup added to the sense of liberation and freedom these young women were seeking, against a backdrop of organised staid life and expectations set by society that didn’t provide them with agency.
Reading through the book I was taken by how familiar the struggles and concerns sound after more than 100 years. Simon discusses the concerns that swept through the society such as the fear of declining morals, and the erosion of the family, the worry that the 'degenerates' were reproducing at a faster rate and would lead to white 'race suicide', how by providing rights to other people you would somehow dilute or erode democracy. All these concerns have been around for a long time. And be around for a long time to come.
The book is fascinating as it looks at how the flappers won a hard fought battle for some semblance of equality and agency and how they were initially derided, then accepted and finally aspired towards.
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