How widespread was the "flapper" sensation of the 1920s?

[Carnac the Magnificent!]

I always assumed the "flapper girl" sensation swept America back in the 1920s, but did it?

I can imagine it was a major fashion trend in Manhattan, Chicago and Los Angeles, but wonder about its impact in America's small cities and far-flung towns. Given the general frill-free existence even in the Roaring 20s, I've got to believe the flapper gal was mainly found in the big cities--and rarely found elsewhere.

True or not?

[BobT]

I don't what you would consider St. Louis to be in the 1920s, but my grandmother, who was the daughter of first generation Croatian immigrants, was well-aware of the phenomenon at the time and she said she wanted to get her bobbed and get the clothes even though she couldn't afford them and her parents wouldn't allow her to get her cut that way.

[Shagnasty]

Here is a list of cities by population in 1920. Demographics have changed a lot since then. Los Angeles was only at #10.

http://www.census.gov/population/documentation/twps0027/tab15.txt

[Zeldar]

Based purely on family photos and such, I can attest that even semi-rural Alabama was aware of, if not totally supportive of, the fashion portion of the era. This in a family that was big on tee-total abstinence from strong drink. So the hair and clothes portion of the fad was all I can vouch for.

As such, I can equate it to the Duck Tail and Flat Top craze of the 50's, of which I was a participant. I suspect the latest fads in clothing, piercings, tats and the like are a similar phenomenon. The biggest fact about change in fashion is that nothing really changes. "Shock the older folks" is the watchword of whatever period.

Wonder how long before we see three-piece suits in grammar school...

[Otto]

In the books Cheaper by the Dozen and Belles on Their Toes, the story of the Gilbreth family (http://gilbrethnetwork.tripod.com/front.html), it shows that the flapper fashion was known in Montclair, New Jersey. How far away that was from New York City, how large Montclair was at the time, I don't know.

[Hilarity N. Suze]

My mother was a flapper in Stillwater, Oklahoma, which is about as far from NYC as you can get. There are pictures in her college yearbook (Oklahoma A&M as it was then known). She scandalized the family with her haircut (which she got before she went off to college, from a fellow inmate at a Catholic girls' boarding school--those libertine Catholics!) and she sewed the clothes herself. She won a local Charleston contest (her family were Methodists and they didn't dance). She took, in college, a life drawing class, where the artists took turns posing undraped.

(Supposedly, this was the same woman who wigged out, circa 1963, when her only daughter expressed the desire to get her ears pierced. I guess you could say she settled down. Or maybe the flapper was kidnapped by aliens and replaced with Church Lady. At any rate, I didn't hear about any of this flapper stuff until I was grown.)

[Zeldar]

I meant to include the fact that Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of F. Scott, who is credited with the term "The Jazz Age" and was the more well-known chronicler of the era, grew up in that hotbed of liberal decadence Montgomery, Alabama. Not long ago there was some biographical thing on F. Scott on one of the cable networks and it went into a great deal of detail about how Zelda's family was scandalized by her behavior. But it also painted a pretty risque picture of Montgomery's social life in that era.

Couple that with Hank Williams and you get as varied a picture of your basic Redneck Capitol as any for LA and NYC, I suggest.

[Zabali_Clawbane]

FWIW, a lady in my childhood church was a flapper as a young woman. IIRC, she was from a small Midwest town in Kansas or Missouri.

[MLS]

My mother, who grew up during the '20s, told me that it was mostly rich city girls who had the time and money to go in for that sort of thing, although others might have been aware of it.

[Exapno Mapcase]

Scott and Zelda, though, were married in NYC on April 3, 1920. Although Zelda might have been risqué by the standards of Montgomery, she was not a flapper per se there. She and Scott, who was from Minnesota, were both of the small-town folks who go wild in the big city type. It was their New York behavior, and more especially, their views of the other young post-bellum revelers whom they partied with that gave rise to the notion of flappers.

Scott claimed that he coined the word with his book of short stories Flappers and Philosophers, published in November 1920. (And that he coined the phrase The Jazz Era.) He didn't, but he did popularize it in its 1920s sense. And his many stories - he published 16 in 1920, along with This Side of Paradise - helped make the notion of flappers a nationwide phenomena. Magazines were almost as influential in creating fads and trends in the 1920s as tv is today. Articles on flappers ran in almost every national magazine from Photoplay to the New Republic.

Montclair, NJ, is a bedroom suburb of NYC just a few miles west of the Hudson. Certainly they would have been aware of anything happening there if they paid any attention.

The flapper craze is a bit like the hippie craze of the 1960s. In NYC it was over by around 1922, just as The Death of Hippie was staged in San Francisco in 1967. Outside of the few big cities, flappers were more an inspiration than an actual lifestyle, even as few people in Montgomery or Saint Paul were true hippies in the late 1960s. But the new fashions and fads of the young were near universal among those who could afford them - flappers were far more an upper middle class phenomena - for the next several years, and became the default norm, even if few people lived their lives as flappers or hippies.

[BrainGlutton]

She won a local Charleston contest (her family were Methodists and they didn't dance).

Just out of curiosity, was the Charleston ever danced in Charleston, SC? If not, how did it get the name?

[Slithy Tove]

My mom stared as a nurse in the early '50's. When she started, none of the women in the geriatric ward smoked. They had been girls during the Edwardian era. Ten years later the place was blue with smoke from the old flappers.

[Hilarity N. Suze]

Just out of curiosity, was the Charleston ever danced in Charleston, SC? If not, how did it get the name?

Not sure how it got the name, but I believe it started as steps from southern blacks in the South.

A lot of tap steps also have names of cities, although the only ones I can think of at the moment are the Cincinatti and the Buffalo. The Madison is kind of a line dance. I don't know the connection of these steps to their namesake cities, either--but there must be some reason!

I am fairly sure the Charleston was danced in Charleston, though.

[twickster]

My mom stared as a nurse in the early '50's. When she started, none of the women in the geriatric ward smoked. They had been girls during the Edwardian era. Ten years later the place was blue with smoke from the old flappers.

Fascinating!

[Carnac the Magnificent!]

A related question to my OP: What made one a flapper?

Was it a quick hair styling and--bang!--you're a flapper? Or was it more of a lifestlye issue? I thought true flappers were free spirits who flouted convention in both dress and manner.

[Zeldar]

A related question to my OP: What made one a flapper?

Was it a quick hair styling and--bang!--you're a flapper? Or was it more of a lifestlye issue? I thought true flappers were free spirits who flouted convention in both dress and manner.

If you'll accept a guess for this, I guess it's like comparable icons from other eras: Bobby Soxers, Beatniks, Hippies, Goths, and maybe even Cowboys.

The core group of True Flappers may have been small in number but large in influence, relatively localized in their actual domain, and perhaps short-lived in terms of their actual influence. (I'm synthesizing from other posts in this thread to arrive at this point.)

But you could probably rewind the Time Machine and ask the gal on the street in Prattville, Alabama, if she were indeed a Flapper, and my guess is she would say with a fair amount of pride and bravado, "Yes!" and blow a smoke-ring in your face.

I also doubt that a big-city reporter in one of the large metropolitan papers would accord this redneck gal the same recognition that her big-city counterparts received, whether out of her lack of all the ingredients that the big-city gal might have, or out of provincialism or snobbery or whatever else would be in the mind of that reporter for reserving the designation Flapper for only the precious few.

So, as in most issues of this sort, the accuracy of applying the term depends on who's calling whom a Flapper.

[Shagnasty]

She won a local Charleston contest (her family were Methodists and they didn't dance). She took, in college, a life drawing class, where the artists took turns posing undraped.

Just a nitpick. Her family may not have danced but it wasn't because they were Methodist. I was raised Methodist and there is nothing to discourage dancing. In fact, we had dancing in the church hall frequently. Perhaps you are thinking of Southern Baptists who do prohibit dancing.

[Bosda Di'Chi of Tricor]

OK, I've got to admit it--the photos /drawings of girls in Flapper fashions seem sexy to me.

I guess I was a bootlegger, in a prior incarnation. :o

[twickster]

Just a nitpick. Her family may not have danced but it wasn't because they were Methodist. I was raised Methodist and there is nothing to discourage dancing. In fact, we had dancing in the church hall frequently. Perhaps you are thinking of Southern Baptists who do prohibit dancing.

Depends on which branch of Methodism -- United Methodist Church is far more liberal than other varieties.

twicks, who did American Church History in a previous incarnation.

[Hilarity N. Suze]

Just a nitpick. Her family may not have danced but it wasn't because they were Methodist. I was raised Methodist and there is nothing to discourage dancing. In fact, we had dancing in the church hall frequently. Perhaps you are thinking of Southern Baptists who do prohibit dancing.

Well, I was raised Methodist too, and ditto on the dancing in the church hall. But either the Methodists changed their policy or the family in the early part of the last century was in a different branch of Methodist-ism (Methodism?) that was overly influenced by the Baptists.

[Rodd Hill]

Given that there was a film released in the USA in 1918 entitled "Flappers and Friskies," it's pretty clear that the phenom was pre-1920s (although it likely didn't percolate downwards to what I may refer to as "middle America" until the 20s--again, compare to the 60s hippy thing and even the rap movement.

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0146756/

There was an even earlier film, "Flapper Goes to School," in 1916: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0293159/

I think there's a lot to be said for the theory that the First World War brought in a lot of fashion changes for women, as so many in Europe and later America, were on War Work--in factories, or doing previously male jobs such as bus conductor, etc.

[Moe Szyslak]

In my grandparents wedding picture that was taken in 1926 or 1927, my grandmother who grew up in Hunter, Okla. (even more rural and remote than the college town of Stillwater) looked like a flapper to me. She had the bangs and bobbed hair, the style of dress associated in my mind with a flapper and a long pearl necklace.

[Carnac the Magnificent!]

From Wikipedia:

"Flapper independence may have its origins in the Gibson girls of the 1890s. Although that pre-war look does not resemble the flapper identity, their independence and feminism may have led to the flapper wise-cracking tenacity thirty years later.

"The term flapper first appears in Britain, based on a perceived similarity to young birds vainly trying to leave the nest. While many in the United States assumed at the time that the term "flapper" derived from a fashion of wearing galoshes unbuckled so that they flapped, the term was documented in use in the UK as early as 1912.

"From the 1900s into the 1920s flapper was a term for any impetuous teenaged girl. Only in the 1920s did the term take on the meaning of the flapper generation style and attitudes. Flappers as a social group were well defined from other 1920s fads."

[Zoe]

The flapper craze is a bit like the hippie craze of the 1960s. In NYC it was over by around 1922, just as The Death of Hippie was staged in San Francisco in 1967. Outside of the few big cities, flappers were more an inspiration than an actual lifestyle, even as few people in Montgomery or Saint Paul were true hippies in the late 1960s. But the new fashions and fads of the young were near universal among those who could afford them - flappers were far more an upper middle class phenomena - for the next several years, and became the default norm, even if few people lived their lives as flappers or hippies.

The death was the hippie was "staged" perhaps, but it didn't take. 1967 in San Francisco is remembered as the Summer of Love, not the end of hipdom. Here's just one example (http://www.farmcatalog.com/cgi-bin/Web_store/web_store.cgi?page=HISTORY/FEhistory.html&cart_id=591575_24134) of where the hipsters went after that. (Hint: It wasn't California and they're still here.) :)

And according to this source (http://www.fashion-era.com/flapper_fashion_1920s.htm#The%20Flapper) on fashion history, flapper fashions were easily affordable:

The flapper fashion style flourished amid the middle classes negating differences between themselves and the truly rich, but continuing to highlight some differences with the really poor. The really rich still continued to wear beautifully embellished silk garments for evening, but the masses revelled in their new found sophistication of very fashionable flapper clothes.

Buttrick dress patterns made the difference. Flapper shifts were an easy style to make at home.

And the behavior wasn't particularly expensive to mimic.

The costume history image in our minds of a woman of the 'Roaring Twenties' is actually likely to be the image of a flapper. Flappers did not truly emerge until 1926. Flapper fashion embraced all things and styles modern. A fashionable flapper had short sleek hair, a shorter than average shapeless shift dress, a chest as flat as a board, wore make up and applied it in public, smoked with a long cigarette holder, exposed her limbs and epitomised the spirit of a reckless rebel who danced the nights away in the Jazz Age.

In fact, those short skirts weren't even in style until 1926, so if the fad was over in NYC by 1922, they missed out on a lot of the fun. By 1928 the "curtains" were lowered again.

Zelda was the thing waiting for the word that would symbolize her. And that word was flapper.. She was ahead of her time -- one of the trend setters.

Recommended reading: Zelda, a biography by Nancy Milford

I can't think of anyone who better fits the name.

[Bosda Di'Chi of Tricor]

Recommended reading: Zelda, a biography by Nancy Milford

I can't think of anyone who better fits the name.

Frankly, there is a very strong contender to challenge her for the title.

LINK (http://www.pandorasbox.com/)

Lovely Lulu....

[Zabali_Clawbane]

According to a Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Brooks) article, Louise Brooks was born in Cherryvale Kansas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherryvale%2C_Kansas). That is a tiny town, and I believe it's always been rather small. I'd say the flapper craze was indeed, widespread.

[Exapno Mapcase]

Zoe, you appear to have misunderstood everything I was trying to say, so let me try again.

There are almost always two separate and easily distinguishable waves in every social-cultural fad. The first comes from the inner core who initiate it and set up its distinctive mannerisms. The second is the larger and more widespread adoption of the fad by those who take their cues from the fashion leaders.

I separated out the two groups deliberately. Scott himself is my source for saying that his set burned out on flapperdom by 1922. He also said that "the sequel was a children's party taken over by elders." Of course others took up the look afterward. Same with hippies. You can see the difference between the real hippies, for whom the Summer of Love was a culmination, and the desperate wannabes who flooded to San Francisco in their wake. It's the difference between Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as Tom Wolfe wrote about them and the drug-addled underage victims of predators in the Haight-Ashberry that Joan Didion wrote about in Slouching Toward Bethlehem. The separation between them was close in time and huge in distance.

Now, did the flapper look evolve from 1920 on? Certainly, just as Mary Quant's first minidresses didn't look much like the hippie garb of the late 1960s. Did the very short skirt come in later? Yes, it did. But that was only a modification of the flapper look, which had already been around for years (http://www.uen.org/utahlink/tours/tourImage.cgi?image_id=21394&tour_id=13227&element_id=17038&category_id=16992).

In the same way, there were only a tiny number of hippies outside of a few major cities in 1967. Most of us looked like we had in 1962. Hippieness did not pervade the rest of the country until several years later.

As for social class, the middle class as a whole was far smaller even as a percent of the population in the 1920s than it is today. Few working class girls could ever be flappers, and that meant that more than half that age group in the population could never be included. Flappers implied a lifestyle simply incompatible with lack of money.

Louise Brooks may have been a flapper but hardly an original one. Scott describes her as "lovely and expensive and about nineteen." Since she was born in 1906, this would put her around 1925, long after Zelda and the others invented flapperdom. She might have been an inspiration to the hinterland wannabes, though.

And what does her place of birth have to do with anything? She wasn't a flapper in 1906 or at any time in her childhood. But she had been in NYC since 1922, as a member of a modern dance troupe, about as culturally distant from Kansas as it was possible to get. By 1925 she was a Follies girl and Charlie Chaplin's lover. Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.

[Zsofia]

My grandmother's First Communion picture was probably in 1927 or 1928. She was 12 or so. She's got bobbed hair, the dropped waisted dress, etc. (This was in Pittsburgh.) When kids start wearing a fashion for churchly occaisions, it's hit the masses (and therefore is ever so passe for the trendy who started the whole thing).

[Miss Purl McKnittington]

Now, did the flapper look evolve from 1920 on? Certainly, just as Mary Quant's first minidresses didn't look much like the hippie garb of the late 1960s. Did the very short skirt come in later? Yes, it did. But that was only a modification of the flapper look, which had already been around for years (http://www.uen.org/utahlink/tours/tourImage.cgi?image_id=21394&tour_id=13227&element_id=17038&category_id=16992).

I'm sorry, Exapno, but that just isn't a good cite. They don't provide the maker of the dress or its provenance, and just date it at 1920. I know it was probably just a kick Google-grab, but looking through the rest of the fashion tour (http://www.uen.org/utahlink/tours/tourFames.cgi?tour_id=13227), they don't cite the sources for any of their images, and quite a few of them have been lifted from different (modern) patternmakers or from different vintage clothing sellers and museum websites. Several items are also misidentified. I'm willing to believe the idea, since similar fashions were seen in Paris, bobbed hair had been around since 1914, etc., but your cite doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

The Fitzgeralds might have given us the nascent beginnings, but our perception of the era is shaped by those who came afterwards. Fashion history usually dates "the look" as really taking hold from 1925-28, and Louise Brooks is viewed, not as a trendsetter, as someone for the general public to emulate. Just because the fashion was started by someone else, who burnt out on it early, doesn't mean that late-comers didn't have anything to contribute. Though the forerunners had finished, the race was not over. The contribution of Brooks et al to the perception of the period is not mitigated by the time they entered it. If the flapper craze had died out in 1922, then it would barely register on our historical radar.

[Exapno Mapcase]

Again, if the hippie craze died out by 1967 we wouldn't be talking about it now either. That doesn't mean that the real hippies weren't c1965-67 and the plastic hippies later. I was never in my life a hippie, but by 1972 I had the hair, the political attitude, the record collection, and the clothes.

Beatniks, OTOH, never achieved that true second movement that turned them into a national phase. We remember the Beats because their cultural attainments were large, but the only beatnik that ever made it onto television was Maynard G. Krebs.

Flappers, however, grew out of three major events: World War I, which gave thousands of men a firsthand look of Europe an isolationist America never had plus the disillusionment of the war's aftermath; Women's Suffrage; and Prohibition. American culture started changing immediately after the doughboys grand return in 1919. By 1920, the trends were already well under way. Let's look at contemporary sources.

For our purposes, the story to read in Fitzgerald's Flappers and Philosophers is "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," a short course in female cattiness circa 1920. His This Side of Paradise drove parents as hysterical as Elvis Presley and the Beatles later did.

A Flapper's Appeal to Parents" by Ellen Welles Page: Published in Outlook, December 6, 1922, p. 607. (http://faculty.pittstate.edu/~knichols/flapperappeal.html) is interesting, for it implies that flapperdom is already old, changing, and dividing into segments.

Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday, a history of the 1920s published in 1931, has this to say:In July, 1920, a fashion writer reported in the New York Timesthat "the American woman ... had lifted her skirts far beyond any modern limitation," which was another way of saying that the hem was now of all nine inches above the ground. It was freely predicted that skirts would come down again in the winter of 1920-21, but instead they climbed a few scandalous inches further. The flappers wore thin dresses, short-sleeved and occasionally (in the evening) sleeveless; some of the wilder young things rolled their stockings below their knees, revealing to the shocked eyes of virtue a fleeting glimpse of shin-bones and knee-cap; and many of them were visibly using cosmetics.

I'm not denying for a moment that the flapper image floated through the entire decade. But every bit of it, except possibly for the shortest of skirts, was in place and actively pursued by 1920. The clothes, the hair, the makeup, the cigarette smoking, the openness toward sex, the dancing, the drinking, the jazz, the whole package. It changed over the decade; it went into more homes; it became more extreme.

I think my real point is that flappers were more than just a "look" in the same way hippies were more than just "long hair." If that's all you go by, your chronology will be off.

[Bosda Di'Chi of Tricor]

And the image of the Flapper is not quite unfamiliar YET. LINK (http://sinfest.net/comics/sf20020118.gif) Link is work-safe, see frame 2.

[Exapno Mapcase]

Coincidence? Serendipity? Synchronicity?

Whatever. I just opened the new issue of American Heritage (February/March 2006) and found an article on flappers!

A short article, at least, mostly a recognition of the new book Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, by Joshua Zeitz (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400080533/ref=sr_11_1/002-4952855-0071214?%5Fencoding=UTF8).

How widespread were flappers? The article gives a tantalizing hint from a 1923 NYTimes newspaper report:
"This little city of Somerset [PA] has been somersaulted into a style class war with the bobbed hair, lip-stick flappers arrayed on one side and their sisters of long tresses and silkless stockings on the other." When the local high school PTA convened to endorse a new dress code that would bar silk stockings, short skirts, bobbed hair, and sleeveless dresses, the flapper contingent defiantly broke into the meeting and chanted:

I can show my shoulders,
I can show my knees,
I'm a free-born American,
And can show what I please.

There's also a still from the 1928 movie Our Dancing Daughters with Dorothy Sebastian, Joan Crawford, and Anita Page that would give the PTA heart attacks. What gams!

[panache45]

My mother was a teenager in Cleveland's Jewish "ghetto" during the '20s, and I have photos showing her and her sisters in full flapper drag. And during prohibition, my grandparents operated a still behind their bakery.

[Doctor Jackson]

Perhaps you are thinking of Southern Baptists who do prohibit dancing.

Well, I was raised Methodist too, and ditto on the dancing in the church hall. But either the Methodists changed their policy or the family in the early part of the last century was in a different branch of Methodist-ism (Methodism?) that was overly influenced by the Baptists.

Hey! Southern Baptists do plenty of stuff that you could rag us about, but this ain't one of them! I work with our youth group and we have live bands and dancing just about every service. There may be some SB churches that discourage or disapprove of dancing but that would be a product of the local church, not denominational theology. Try the Primitive Baptists down the street.

[Zeldar]

Hey! Southern Baptists do plenty of stuff that you could rag us about, but this ain't one of them! I work with our youth group and we have live bands and dancing just about every service. There may be some SB churches that discourage or disapprove of dancing but that would be a product of the local church, not denominational theology. Try the Primitive Baptists down the street.

It may also be a product of the era as to how much (if any) dancing SB churches allow. Era, location, individual church policy, all may be involved. But in the 50's when slow dancing with couples in close contact was still the norm, the SB churches I attended, one in a small town and another in a city, both frowned on dancing. Whether rock-based dancing-at-a-distance modified the objections to dancing in general, I don't remember. My parents were No Dancing regardless types. I was a full adult before I danced my first step.

BTW, you know why Baptists don't make love standing up, don't you? :D

[Crandolph]

Demographically the US was still a rural, farming nation in the 1920s, and the cities were still largely populated by recent immigrants. Not sure how the fashions trickled down to those two groups but I should think the actual lifestyle was a possibility for very few.