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?
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.
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
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…
In the books Cheaper by the Dozen and Belles on Their Toes, the story of the Gilbreth family, 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just out of curiosity, was the Charleston ever danced in Charleston, SC? If not, how did it get the name?
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.
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.
Fascinating!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.