What Flappers Stood For
(Flapper Magazine, 1922)
Here is a page listing everything that the Flappers adored and found worth getting up in the morning to pursue.
Flappers
‘A Flapper’s Appeal to Parents”
(The Outlook, 1922)
If one judges by appearances, I suppose I am a flapper. I am within the age limit, I wear bobbed hair, the badge of flapperhood. I powder my nose. I wear fringed skirts and bright colored sweaters, and scarves and waists with Peter Pan collars and low-heeled ‘finale hopper’ shoes. I adore to dance… But then there are many degrees of a flapper. There is the semi-flapper, the flapper, the super-flapper. Each of these three main general divisions has its degrees of variation. I might possibly be placed somewhere in the middle of the first class.
Ode to Feminine Knees
(Flapper Magazine, 1922)
When the skirt hems began to rise in the Twenties, it was widely understood that the vision of a woman’s leg was a rare treat for both man and boy; a spectacle that had not been enjoyed since the days of Adam (married men excluded). The flappers certainly knew this, and they generally believed that suffering the dizzying enthusiasm of the male of the species was a small price to pay in order to secure some element of liberty. The flappers liked their hem-lengths just where they were and, thank you very much, they were not about to drop them. Attached are some verses by an anonymous flapper who expressed her reaction regarding all that undeserved male attention her knees were generating.
The Spirit of Flappers
(NY Times, 1922)
Speaking about why she loved the Twenties, Diana Vreeland (1903 – 1989) – observant fashion editor and unique fashion phenomenon, once remarked on a chat show that there’s never been a woman with her clothes chopped off at the knee in history. Indeed – Vreeland would find the attached article about flappers to be spot-on.
Flappers Altered the Sexual Contract in Society
(Coronet Magazine, 1955)
Perhaps the above headline gives a wee-bit too much credit to the flappers for changing the sex codes of North America – but it certainly would never have happened without them. They were one of the necessary elements, in addition to motion pictures, recorded music, automobiles and greater job opportunities for women, that, when mixed together created a new social contract. The attached article spells it all out as to how the flappers of the 1920s had stripped the female body of its Victorian wrappings and proudly displayed it in the sunlight.
You might also want read about sex during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
‘Is the Younger Generation in Peril?”
(Literary Digest, 1921)
The deans who presided over Literary Digest made this article their lead piece, so urgent was the sensation that an onslaught of vengeful modernist women, so fleet of foot and irreverently unhampered by hanging hems and confining corsets, were approaching their New York offices as their first act in disassembling the patriarchy.
New Fashioned Girls
(Flapper Magazine, 1922)
Unearthed by a team of underpaid urban anthropologists digging all hours in the skankiest and most vile of magazine repositories was this single page of feminine poesy representative of an obscure, forgotten genre of Twentieth Century prosody that celebrated a brash cast of woman that was once known as a Flapper.
Alas, the name of the poet has been lost to time.
The Plot to Restore the Corset
(The New Republic, 1922)
A shewed observer of fashion, Mary Alden Hopkins (1856 – 1930) noted how the Victorian dinosaurs who lorded-over the male-dominated, pro-corset fashion industry had attempted (unsuccessfully) to manipulate and coerce the shoppers of the early Twenties to reject the Chanel-inspired revolt that the young flappers were currently enjoying.
How can I sell these styles?…the flappers won’t buy them.
The Depiction of Mothers in Silent Film
(Pathfinder, 1926
This one is from the more things change, the more they stay the same department; it was penned by an outraged woman who was plenty peeved that nascent Hollywood chose to cast geezers to play the rolls of mothers in their movies. In light of the fact that women had babies at far, far younger ages one hundred years ago, she illustrated her point with an anecdote pulled from the annals of the Chicago Police Department.
The Common Sense of the Flappers
(Flapper Magazine, 1922)
Originally writing for the Forrest Park Review, Flapper advocate Myrtle Heilman (1895 – 1973) opined that the Flapper was the one and only topic of the day worth thinking about:
Analyze her dress. It’s the most sensible thing since Eve. She wears rolled socks and why shouldn’t she? They are extremely cool and comfortable. Her toddle pumps are fairly low-heeled and she doesn’t try to squeeze into a Cinderella. Her skirts are short because it’s the fashion. Her bobbed hair is cool, sensible and sanitary. There is a twinkle in her eye and she has a saucy cock-sureness. And why shouldn’t she?
She does respect her parents and she obeys them, just as well as her grandmother did hers, but she has common sense and she knows when it’s time to use her own judgment and exercise her own authority.
VANITY FAIR Throws a Bobbed Hair Party
(Vanity Fair, 1919)
A smattering of cartoons depicting those sweet young things of yore who were partial to bathtub gin, short skirts and
short hair styles.
In 1919 you didn’t have to be plugged-in 24/7 to the youth scene in order to recognize that bobbed hair was where the fickle finger of fashion was pointing. Perhaps the editors of VANITY FAIR presumed that a bobbed hair party was the best social alternative that could have been offered six months after the 1919 passage of the 18th Amendment, which ushered in the Prohibition of alcohol throughout the United States.
Flaming Youth
(Time Magazine, 1923)
Here is an entirely unsympathetic Time Magazine review of the 1922 film, Flaming Youth starring Colleen Moore and Milton Sills. The uncredited reviewer really wasn’t buying any of it and was not at all impressed with the morality of Flappers. Today, Flaming Youth has deteriorated to just just a few feet of film and rests in the vaults of the Library of Congress; the reviewer probably would be pleased to know that.
The Back-Hand from a Flapper
(Flapper Magazine, 1922)
Flapper Magazine crowned itself the
official organ of the national flapper’s flock
If nothing else, this verbiage simply spells out that the editors took themselves very, very seriously indeed and it was in that same spirit they gleefully went to work disemboweling a movie that they saw as anti-flapper to its very core. The film in question was
Nice People (Paramount, 1922) starring Bebe Daniels and Wallace Reid. Produced by Willam C. deMille (1878 – 1955), elder brother of Cecil, the film makers were clearly intimating that nice people will always keep their flapper daughters in line; it is at that point in the flick when the reviewer dipped her pen in the ink:
This is one of the themes that ‘old fogies‘ usually delight in; the ‘reformation’ of the flapper… The picture is replete with pithy subtitles, such as ‘the smart girl of today removes the rouge from her lips only to kiss and make up.’
British Flappers
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1914)
Click here to read more articles about flappers.Read more …
The Flapper Debate
(Literary Digest, 1921)
This article is made up of the musings of various editors, university presidents and social reformers discussing the cultural relevance of the Flapper and the cultural changes she has brought forth.
Colleen Moore: A Flapper in Hollywood
(The Flapper Magazine, 1922)
By the time this piece appeared in The Chicago Daily News (prior to being picked up by the fast crowd at Flapper Magazine) Colleen Moore was all of twenty-one years of age with fourteen Hollywood films to her credit. This interview was conducted over lunch by the polished Hollywood reporter Gladys Hall, who we’re sure picked up the check; on that day Miss Moore wanted to talk about flappers, a flock she was proud to be numbered among (and a subject she seemed to know well).
Flapper Poesy
(Literary Digest, 1922)
More juvenile flapper verses revealing that the flapper is as old as history itself – and far more meddlesome than her male counterpart.
Click here to read a FLAPPER MAGAZINE review of an anti-flapper movie.
Click here to read an article about the demise of a popular 1940s hairstyle.
Comprehending the Flapper Revolt
(Vanity Fair, 1921)
In the early Twenties there were a good many social changes which men had to struggle to understand; among them was the Modern Woman. The Italian novelist and lexicographer Alfredo Panzini (1863 – 1939) attempted to do just that for the editors of Vanity Fair.
‘Don’t expect us’, she says to you, disconsolate male, ‘don’t expect us to be like the old-fashioned girls who went to church, and did the laundry, and looked up to their husbands as to their God.’