Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity & the Women Who Made America Modern

by Joshua Zeitz

  Symes’s generation of feminists—women who came of age just before World War I—weren’t prudes. They were “determined to have both, to try for everything life would offer of love, happiness, and freedom—just like men.” This didn’t entail a rejection of femininity. The key notion was balance.

  “If in those younger days we believed didactically in our right to smoke and drink, we considered over-indulgence in either ‘rather sloppy’ if not anti-social,” she wrote. “If we talked about free love and if a few even practiced it ‘as a matter of principle,’ we should have been thoroughly revolted by the promiscuous pawing and petting permitted by so many technically virtuous younger women today.… If all this makes us sound like prigs, I can assure you we were not. We made ourselves as attractive as we knew how to be, we were particular about our clothes, and few of us ever ‘sat out’ dances.”

  Many prewar activists agreed that “sex rights”—“the right of women to a frank enjoyment of the sensuous side of the sex-relation”—deserved an important place in the feminist agenda.3 Like their flapper successors, they also sought new meaning and fulfillment in romance.

  In 1926, Freda Kirchwey, editor of the liberal journal The Nation, solicited autobiographical essays from a group of seventeen feminist leaders, most of them middle-aged women who grew up before the war. All but three were or had been married at some time during their lives. Their stories, which ran under the banner “These Modern Women,” revealed an almost uniform desire to balance career and family and to stake out a new and satisfying kind of “companionate marriage” in which husbands and wives interacted as friends and equals in their relationships.4

  Most of these women were also social activists. Their feminism combined a concern for the personal and the political.

  In the prewar years, prominent radical women in New York had even founded a group called Heterodoxy, which convened regularly at a Greenwich Village restaurant to discuss sex, romance, politics, and culture.5 Some of the participants practiced heterosexual free love, others were involved in long-term monogamous relationships with men; some were lesbians, and some were celibate. Heterodoxy celebrated the idea of free choice and personal fulfillment.

  As Lillian Symes noted, prewar feminists had matched their burning desire for personal fulfillment with an intense engagement in the world around them. “While we were not all political radicals,” she maintained, “we were examining our socio-economic order and our sex mores with an inquisitive and skeptical eye.”6

  But the Jazz Age flapper? She was another matter entirely. Disengaged from politics, more interested in shopping than picketing, drunk on the ethic of sexual freedom and romance, the flapper struck many feminists as misguided at best. At worst, a sellout.

  The ferocity of these attacks betrayed some of the deep political fissures that ran through feminist circles after World War I. Having won the vote in 1920, women’s rights activists now faced the daunting challenge of reconciling sharply divergent ideologies and priorities that threatened to rend the movement in two just as it graduated into the mainstream of American life. With feminists now engaged in a hot contest over just what “feminism” really meant, the flapper became a convenient whipping girl who could unite competing factions in universal condemnation and scorn.

  American women had certainly traveled a long road from rural Seneca Falls, in upstate New York, where one hundred people convened on July 19, 1848, to sign a “Declaration of Sentiments” drafted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.7 Borrowing directly from the Declaration of Independence, these early activists boldly averred that “all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights: that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

  The generation of women’s rights activists who lent their names to this creed had cut their political teeth on radical abolitionism. Stirred by William Lloyd Garrison’s cry for an immediate and unconditional end to chattel slavery, crusaders like Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott built a strong argument for women’s emancipation on the very same natural rights foundation that informed the abolitionist movement. If all men were equal—unlike most of the country, abolitionists believed passionately that this was the case—weren’t men and women also equal to each other? If it was wrong to hold humans in bondage, wasn’t it also wrong to deny women the right to vote, hold property, sit on juries, enter the professions, and enjoy equal treatment in divorce and custody proceedings? The founders of the women’s movement thought so, as did many of their male abolitionist supporters like Garrison, Bronson Alcott, Wendell Phillips, Gerrit Smith, Theodore Parker, and Frederick Douglass.

  But times changed, and so did the women’s rights movement.

  Over the next seventy-five years, no one could have appreciated better the strange trajectory of American protofeminism than Charlotte Woodward, a nineteen-year-old farmer’s daughter who traveled all day by horse-drawn cart to attend the Seneca Falls convention.8 Woodward, who dreamed of being a typesetter (and, in the words of a perceptive historian, “might as well have aspired to fly to the moon”), was the only signer of the Declaration of Sentiments who lived to see the Nineteenth Amendment ratified in 1920.

  In Woodward’s youth, crusaders for women’s rights rested their argument on the logic of absolute equality. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of Charlotte’s early heroes, acknowledged that men and women were not “the same and identical”—either by nature or nurture, women were more moral and kind, men more aggressive and dogmatic. But the “rights of every human being are the same and identical.”9

  By the turn of the century, as Charlotte Woodward edged toward middle age and august pioneers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony passed from the scene, a new generation of women’s leaders shifted the emphasis of the suffrage argument. Out of expediency, they accepted at face value the predominant Victorian belief that women and men were inexorably different and maybe just a little unequal.

  According to prevailing wisdom, it was a woman’s natural role to provide a stable, soothing home life for her husband and to confer an ethical education on her children.10 Left to their own devices, men were easily given over to excess and decadence. The same emerging industrial economy that demanded sober, self-controlled employees to staff its factories and offices needed wives and mothers to exert a civilizing influence at home. In the absence of that civilizing influence, men would never learn to master their impulses and lead the kinds of sturdy, disciplined lives that would make them good employees in a new, industrial order.

  This was always a false ideal. Middle-class Americans could comfortably espouse the virtues of separate spheres, but for millions of women in the textile mills of New England and the Piedmont, the garment factories of Chicago and New York, and the cotton fields of Mississippi and Alabama, the grind of poverty demanded that sons and daughters share equally in the punishing routine of wage labor.

  To many second-generation suffragists, most of whom hailed from comfortable, middle-class backgrounds, whether or not the Victorian gender system actually mirrored reality was entirely beside the point.11 It was popular and enjoyed wide support, especially among men of influence. Rather than fight the gender code, suffragists used it to their advantage. In a rapidly industrializing and urban nation where the line between public and private was often blurred, they claimed, a woman could not fulfill her duty to safeguard the domestic sphere unless she was granted political rights.

  “Women who live in the country sweep their own dooryards and … either feed the refuse of the table to a flock of chickens or allow it innocently to decay in the open air and sunshine,” wrote the distinguished settlement house founder Jane Addams in an article entitled “Why Women Should Vote.”12 But in “a crowded city quarter … if the street is not cleaned by the city authorities no amount of private sweeping will keep the tenement free from grime; if the garbage is not properly collected and destroyed a tenement house mother may s
ee her children sicken and die of diseases.…”

  The modern world was too complex to sustain rigid divisions between public and domestic spheres, Addams explained. People now lived in closer quarters, bought most of their food and household items from stores, and came into daily contact with urban blight and vice. In short, “If woman would keep on with her old business of caring for her house and rearing her children she will have to have some conscience in regard to public affairs lying outside of her immediate household.”

  “Women’s place is Home,” Rheta Childe Dorr affirmed in 1910.13 “But home is not contained within the four walls of an individual house. Home is community. The city full of people is the Family. The public school is the real Nursery. And badly do Home and Family need their mother.”

  This rationale for equal suffrage resonated with many Americans who were prepared to grant women a role in politics but weren’t ready to reject Victorian notions about gender difference. So in the years before World War I, at thousands of dramatic torchlight parades and petition drives, mainstream suffragists softened the potentially radical implications of their cause by insisting that women wanted the vote primarily to be better wives and mothers—not to engage in a power grab or to press unorthodox ideas on an unwilling nation. It proved a winning formula.

  But in the wake of their stunning constitutional victory in 1920, former allies in the suffrage cause found themselves torn over the implications of this argument.

  Over the preceding decade, even as it pressed for equal suffrage, the women’s lobby had also pressured states into enacting maximum work hours for women.14 By 1925, all but four states bent to political pressure and set anywhere between eight-hour and ten-hour workdays for women. Other states even banned women from working at night or set minimum wages for women workers. The women’s lobby had also campaigned for health and safety measures that would shield women from the ruinous effects of industrial work. In an era when few Americans enjoyed any real protection against the whims of their employers, these statutes succeeded in alleviating some of the most egregious conditions for women who toiled in textile factories in Paterson, New Jersey, or fruit canneries in Los Angeles.

  But in order to justify these laws—in order to get the legislatures to pass them and the courts to uphold them—feminists had to concede that women needed special shelter from mental, emotional, and bodily harm.15 If women were naturally weaker than men—and this is precisely what future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis famously argued in the 1908 case Muller v. Oregon, which established a legal precedent for women’s labor laws—then the state had a compelling public interest in extending them special protection.

  It wasn’t necessarily hypocritical to press for equal voting rights and special labor legislation. After all, mainstream suffrage groups based their demand for enfranchisement on the premise that women were different from men—physically weaker, morally stronger—but nevertheless in need of the vote.

  By the 1920s, not all feminists agreed on this point.

  On one side of the divide stood so-called social feminists, many of them members of reform groups like the National Women’s Trade Union League, the National Consumer’s League, and the League of Women Voters (the successor to the National American Woman Suffrage Association). Even as they celebrated their achievement of equal voting rights, social feminists continued to argue that women were a more delicate sex, in need of special protective legislation.

  This tack didn’t sit well with members of the National Woman’s Party (NWP). Led by the fiery young Quaker activist Alice Paul, the NWP wholly rejected the maternalist argument for women’s enfranchisement and called for an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution—a measure that would ban all policy distinctions between men and women.16

  It wasn’t that Alice Paul was totally unsympathetic to working women. “Personally, I do not believe in special protective labor legislation for women,” she said. “It seems to me that protective labor legislation should be enacted for women and men alike … and not along sex lines.” Another member of the NWP warned, “If women can be segregated as a class for special legislation, the same classification can be used for special restrictions along any other line which may, at any time, appeal to the caprice or prejudice of our legislatures.”17

  To the NWP, feminism could not afford to compromise on the idea of equality, even if such a position might temporarily set back the cause of working women. If women wanted to share equally in life’s pleasures, they couldn’t claim special immunities from life’s trouble.

  Social feminists hit back hard. A member of the League of Women Voters asserted it was obvious that “the most important function of woman in the world is motherhood, that the welfare of the child should be the first consideration, and that because of their maternal functions women should be protected against undue strains.”18 Many social feminists were middle-class reformers who genuinely felt concerned for “the tired and haggard faces of young waitresses, who spend seventy hours a week of hard work in exchange for a few dollars to pay for food and clothing.” It was all well and good to invoke abstract doctrines of legal and social equality, but ultimately the ERA wing of the feminist movement would only “free women from the rule of men … to make them greater slaves to the machines of industry.”19

  These issues would take years to resolve. In the meantime, if they could agree on little else, feminists across the divide found most young women in the 1920s sorely lacking in the kind of ideological rigor and political commitment that their own generation of activists had exhibited on such a grand scale. Much as veteran second-wave feminists of the 1990s would lament the seemingly apolitical posture of Gen-X women, flappers simply didn’t strike first-wave feminists in the 1920s as concerned one way or the other about the weightier issues of the day. None of this seemed to augur well for the future of feminism.

  When conservatives denounced feminists for betraying a “flapper attitude,” they were missing the point entirely.20 Most committed feminists were also chagrined by American flapperdom.

  There were a few exceptions. Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, a noted liberal writer, defended the “modern young woman” who viewed feminism as “a term of opprobrium.” The problem wasn’t the lipstick-wielding flapper, Bromley wrote, but the “old school of fighting feminists who wore flat heels and had little feminine charm” and their successors—self-styled feminists of the 1920s who “antagonize men with their constant clamor about maiden names, equal rights, women’s place in the world, and many another causes … ad infinitum.”

  Young women weren’t frivolous or apolitical, Bromley argued. They weren’t trading politics for pleasure. Rather, they were “feminists—New Style—truly modern” Americans who “admit that a full life calls for marriage and children” but “at the same time … are moved by an inescapable inner compulsion to be individuals in their own right.”21

  The young woman of the 1920s, Bromley concluded, “knows that it is her American, her twentieth-century birthright to emerge from a creature of instinct into a full-fledged individual who is capable of molding her own life.22 And in this respect she holds that she is becoming man’s equal.”

  In condemning the flapper for her turn inward, first-wave feminists may have betrayed a lack of imagination. Perhaps the trick wasn’t to combine the personal and the political. Maybe the personal was political. Maybe the flapper was pioneering a distinct brand of individualist feminism.

  Illustrator John Held Jr. captured the spirit of the Jazz Age.

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  THE LINGERIE SHORTAGE IN THIS COUNTRY

  EVERYWHERE ONE TURNED in the mid-1920s, sex was on the brain.1 When Americans weren’t having it, they were thinking about it or reading about it.

  Magazine aficionados consumed real-life glossies like True Confessions, Telling Tales, True Story, and Flapper Experiences, which ran stories with such lurid titles as “Indolent Kisses” and “The Primitive Lover” (“She wanted a caveman husband”). Dish detergent
advertisements featuring scantily dressed Egyptian women guaranteed the “beauty secret of Cleopatra hidden in every cake” of Palmolive. Popular songs of the era included “Hot Lips,” “I Need Lovin’,” and “Nursing Kisses.”

  Movie posters for films like The Cowboy and the Flapper—“See What Happens When the Cowboy and the Flapper Meet. William Fairbanks and Dorothy Revier do their stuff in a way that raises this picture into the ranks of really dramatic production”—testified to the new level of sexual candor that permeated mass culture.

  Though her columns appeared to suggest that Lois Long was dating half the eligible bachelors in Manhattan—and maybe a few of the ineligible ones, too—sometime around 1926 she became romantically involved with the New Yorker’s swank but mercurial staff artist, Peter Arno, who pioneered the magazine’s distinctive cartoon humor. He was, as The New York Times would later write, “tall, urbane, impeccably dressed, with the kind of firm-jawed good looks popularized in old Arrow collar ads.”2

  The scion of a prominent New York family (his father was a state supreme court justice), Arno—né Curtis Arnoux Peters—was raised with the best people and attended the best schools (Hotchkiss, Yale). Yet he did everything he could to cast off the shackles of Victorian respectability. At Yale, he dabbled in music and art rather than business or law. Upon graduation, he moved to Greenwich Village rather than the Upper East Side. He changed his name. He changed his friends. But he could never change the way he talked—that upper-crust accent common to Hotchkiss boys—or the way he walked. And he couldn’t change that winning smile.