by Betsy Israel
At Collier’s, the girl’s home for many years, the staff practiced editorial taxonomy, organizing and subdividing the character’s various incarnations into seven distinct types of modern goddess: the Boy-Girl, the Flirt, the Beauty, the Sentimental, the Convinced, the Ambitious, the Well-Balanced or Rounded. Regardless of her precise type, the magazine declared, “she is incarnate, a representation of modernity, individuality, and personality.” As a female fan wrote in a letter to the magazine: “We admire most about her the manner in which she keeps her own counsel.” When pictured with one of her inevitable suitors, the Gibson girl rarely looked directly at him; rather, she gazed off into the distance, suggesting that she saw on the horizon possibilities beyond that man, or suggesting perhaps to the man that he would never penetrate to the core of her self-containment.
The girl, whether girl-boy athletic, well-balanced friend, flirt, or beauty, became a young single icon in the same way that white slaving became the iconic crime committed against the single girl: through the burgeoning media. The slave scare came alive on film; the Gibson girl was born in print and took on larger life as she was reproduced in a mass-merchandising campaign historic in its scope.
It’s true that stage stars and characters such as Trilby had appeared before on wallet cards, postcards, and wall-size posters (many saloons were miniature shrines to certain adored actresses). But the Gibson girl appeared everywhere: on china dishes, drinking glasses, furniture (vanities, dressers, hallway chairs and chests), calendars, flasks, cigarette cases, flatware, paper dolls, dress patterns, hair ribbons, ink blotters, and on down a long list that ends in lockets and thimbles. Her image also inspired look-alike pageants and song and essay contests, and of course she had dances and drinks named for her.
It was as a mass commercial entity that the Gibson girl had her greatest impact on single-womanhood. Nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century advertising concentrated on endorsing and explaining a product’s merits, at very great length and often in very tiny print. The emphasis was on solidity and tradition, a confident masculine promise of quality. But as single young women attained some purchasing power, it became clear that the old ways—selling only to wives and mothers—would not hold. Nor would the dull thousand-word odes to the sturdy reliability of a detergent. The Gibson girl provided a form of early branding, a visual shorthand for a product’s values that had previously required great amounts of text to describe.
As early as 1915, the Ivory Soap girl, traditionally a symbol of saint-like purity, had become a rouged and healthy-looking Gibson type. These ads contained less text than had previous ads, and the illustration of the girl was larger. In this way, the Gibson prefigured the eventual death of testimonials and the rise of psychological advertising, that is, the use of images to put forth a dream world, a perfect person—things and qualities you might have, that you might actually be, if you would only buy the product. Just as early silent films propagated cautionary tales for new women, ads began, just a little bit, to peddle images of freedom and beauty.
Ironically, the Gibson girl also seemed to reassure those who believed that “new woman” was an oxymoron, or should be. Generally speaking, these were confused and troubling times—years of violent strikes and demonstrations, of anarchist bombings. Little more than a decade before, the president, William McKinley, had been assassinated, and the First World War was already under way in Europe. In some drawings the Gibson girl seemed soft and ethereal rather than sharp, and brilliantly new. Sometimes she was just a pretty head that floated high above a soothing landscape, making her less a symbol of modernity and change than an angel.
Ultimately Mr. Gibson grew tired of drawing her, just as his public became slightly bored with her limited exploits. And as it happened, another, far jazzier female icon was already in view.
But first a brief eulogy for the Gibson girl, circa 1916, courtesy of one male columnist in San Francisco: “She is as thrilling as a phone pole.”
COME FLAP WITH ME
In 1920, the year the suffrage amendment became law, the Flapper—not the suffragist or anyone remotely like her—emerged as the supreme incarnation of the early-century single woman.
She burst to life in all forms of popular media as a much more precise and confident variation of the “1914 girl,” the bachelor girl who’d snuck out to the tea dance, her hair tied up in imitation of a bob. Now all hair was short, waved, and often covered by a cloche modeled on a World War I GI helmet; dresses, tubular sheaths set off by long strands of beads, hung from the shoulders. The eyes were kohl-lined and the lipstick so dark it almost looked purple. (Ann Douglas in her remarkable study of New York in the 1920s, Terrible Honesty, reports that one popular lipstick brand was called “Eternal Wound.”) Above the regiment of pointed shoes, the flapper wore sheer hose that she often rolled down several inches along the thigh, suggesting socks and schoolgirls while at the same time alluding to a stripper. According to flapper legend, as created largely by enamored advertisers, corsets had been banished and beneath her boyish yet exotic finery she wore lingerie. My favorite brand name of the era: “Silk and Nothingness.”
The Bowery girls, like the shoppies, had formed a premodern female youth group based on work and class. The new women were an educated contingent of serious and brave politicos, the bohemians a diverse band of self-declared eccentrics. The flappers were singular democrats. Anyone could join. Whether she worked, studied, taught, performed, or played around, all a woman needed “to flap” was a youthful appearance and attitude—a sassy vocabulary, a cool way with men, a bit of daring, humor, and some professional smarts. Lacking these latter qualities, one could easily just dress the part. (A sheath was much simpler, and cheaper, to sew than a shirtwaist.) One talent-agency secretary, interviewed in Look during the 1960s about her flapping years, explained:
I was a shy girl, not a girl who danced on tables at roadhouses, or not even on the dance floor… [but] I liked the clothes, how modern and how comfortable they felt…. You dressed in your flapper’s clothes, you drove around—everybody drove around—you seemed to belong to a club… you seemed more confident. You… were looked at as one of the “popular kids” [and]… you could start to feel that way. Big deal that you had two left feet, couldn’t drive either…. You were the most up-to-date Modern there was. That’s what everyone saw.
It was during the postwar, postvote flapper era that modern life as we’d recognize it began to take shape. In 1920 the country was officially declared an urban rather than an agrarian nation—a cityscape wired for communication via telephones, telegraphs, movies, and radios. Speed had insinuated itself into every area of modern life, and nowhere was this acceleration more heightened and intriguing than in Manhattan. It wasn’t only all the cars, or the young women in the cars (called “rolling hotels”) riding with men they had previously courted at home in sight of parents. Neither was it jazz nor the complex new dances that made the spiel look crude and dated. A slightly manic style was spreading in all sectors of the New York population: Housewives, using “revolutionary home technologies,” finished their work in several hours, then rushed around trying to fill in their afternoons. Shop girls and businessmen alike “wolfed down” lunch while standing at counters. Society parties vied with secretive, strange, but no less ambitious costume balls in Greenwich Village; single girls threw parties; coeds threw parties. Everyone went out, drove somewhere, walked briskly; people started running for sport.
The flapper was the female embodiment of this tempo shift.
She was the first single woman ever to wear a wristwatch. To drive and possibly own a car and to have her own “revolutionary home technologies” in the form of unusual new products. The most important among these were tampons (developed by nurses during the war and later patented by a male doctor), depilatories, and tanning lotions, this last essential ever since Coco Chanel had decreed that to be modern was to have been running around, exercising, in the sun.
If flappers were the embodiment, the “s
upreme incarnation” of all this newness, that’s because they were the first singles to be viewed as a peer group and as a peer demographic—a distinct subset of the population interesting from a sociological as well as an economic perspective. Like that late-1940s creation, the teenager, flappers were identified as unique consumers to be studied and pampered as if they had the buying power of wives. Or something close to it. In 1900 there were 5,237 female college graduates in the United States; by 1910 there were 8,437; and in 1921, more than ten thousand young women had graduated either from college or graduate school. Combined with all those already out there in the workplace, these young women formed the rearguard forces of a significant social movement: more women living for longer periods of time on their own before marriage. If they weren’t likely to rush out and buy major appliances, they would buy much more expensive merchandise, and more of it, than ever before. Advertisers, primitive marketers, set out to “speak” to them, as if through a national megaphone.
For years, most female ads featured women’s faces or women posed behind counters, most often kitchen counters that cut them off at the waist. And that included the all-modern Gibson girl Ivory Soap ad; she had appeared as a blushing face inside a circle. The Gibson may have advanced the concept of single-girl “branding,” of targeting and specifically addressing an identifiably single woman, but flappers took it further. Flappers appeared whole—walking dogs, stretched out across cars, crouched and set to dive wearing shiny Jantzen bathing suits. The point, lost on very few young women, was that for a time they could seem wholly formed without marriage, or while ostensibly in search of marriage. The point was further made to women no longer considered young at all.
In 1915 Cosmopolitan had pronounced that women of “all, all ages, every one” could and should be “beautiful, fascinating, attractive.” Ten years later a male correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post marveled that beneath “the aegis of flapperdom” women pushing thirty, even thirty-five, were now saved from the taint of spinsterism.
It was that war, cracked open the world!… Now these beneficiaries of war work… [have] evolved into the business-like art-loving fashion-setting spinsters of today… burst free from her thin-necked anxious service-without-pay chrysalis, [she] spreads her purple and gold wings… sail[ing] gracefully into the horizon blue of a new existence.
The term “flapper” actually dates from the First World War, although there are still disagreements about its origins. Critic Edmund Wilson wrote that it was derived from the flapping sound of a baby duck’s wings as it struggled to fly. Others have pointed out that “flapper” is an old term for a young prostitute, while still others have nominated the clacking sound of those long beads as a girl ran out of the house or as she danced. But the preferred theory of origin lies with the “beneficiaries” of wartime jobs.[7] In bad weather, many factory workers put on enormous boots they did not bother to buckle as they left work. Perhaps they were too exhausted. Perhaps they liked the sound of buckles jangling as six girls wandered the street. Six girls across, six pairs of flopping boots, and a lot of giggling: That was the original sound of flapping.
The finalized flapper icon was likewise a product of the war years. By 1918, there were more than three hundred films circulating the country at any given time, many of them featuring well-defined flapper characters. The movie bibles Photoplay and Modern Picture World (b. 1911) referred to the actresses who played them as “America’s Pals,” girls just like the reader, with one enormous exception. The pals all had “It.” As defined by scenarist and director Elinor Glyn, It—the quintessential flapper trait—was a form of perceptual physics. In the heat of a media frenzy, the celebration of something “new,” all of a culture’s most desirable traits attached themselves to one young icon everyone else then imitated. But It, the sum total of many tiny acts of adorability, was hard to mimic. It just came to you: a shoe positioned at a clever angle. Well-timed winking. Clever tap-dancing moves away from lecherous men. A fashion columnist summarized in Vogue, “One has IT or one does not.”
But most every silent screen star, and many of the women who watched and read about them tried hard to evolve their own unique sense of It.
Gloria Swanson and Joan Crawford began their careers playing richgirl flappers, roadhouse dollies, and office workers who expressed their sense of It by suggestively blowing cigarette smoke into the faces of their leading men. Colleen Moore and Louise Brooks introduced the slick black helmet haircut and a speedy double-talking sense of It that was deceptively fun and eccentric. If asked to be fully candid, their characters might have confessed: “I am so cute and charming, you will inevitably fail to understand that I am also crazy, irresponsible, and destructive!” Even D. W. Griffith, master of the epochal silent film, took on a flapper who, in attaining It, seemed to have injected amphetamines. Carole Dempster, a wild-eyed, frizzy-haired actress, swam marathons, rode bikes or horses, played tennis, tossed hatchets, and, whenever possible, did the jitterbug, which had been called “a dance of anxiety and bitterness.” All within the course of one movie.
But the star with the essence of It was Clara Bow, a redhead with a strategically placed beauty mark and a Brooklyn squawk that would ruin her career in the sound era. She played all variety of flapperish working girls—a manicurist in Red Hair (1928), a swimming instructor in Kid Boots (1926), and, among many others, a lingerie shop girl in It (1927), a film that grossed an astonishing one million dollars. The Bow characters were distinguished by their effervescent refusal to accept class distinctions. In many of her films, her characters “land” a better kind of guy by easing in and out of social milieus (the Ritz and Coney Island all in a weekend!) relying only on their high-spirited personalities to erase any awkwardness.
But having It, running around, trying hard to seem fresh and daring, could be interpreted in other ways. To many Americans, the flapper, as depicted on-screen and in the three thousand magazines published monthly circa 1923, was little more than a potential slut.
Sex and danger were big selling points in flapper films, as reflected in their titles: Strictly Unconventional, Speed Crazed, Wickedness Preferred, In Search of Sinners, Dangerous Business. And the flappers, the It girls, were portrayed, at best, as lightly naughty. For example, they shoplifted. They stole boyfriends. Drank. Or, in many cases, they were chorus girls, a job title that encompassed all the above tendencies. The American Film Institute has cataloged 101 flapper films that featured “chorines,” among them, Sally of the Scandals and An Affair of the Follies. The naughty fictional flapper was also sometimes a schoolgirl. In two-reelers typically entitled Honey and Sweetie, student flappers lounged around their rooms smoking and—this was often depicted as an activity—“wearing lingerie.” After a while the coeds put on clothes and attended their classes. For the rest of the film they flirted with handsome professors, who seemed frightened.
Naturally these films were accused of encouraging the worst aspects of It: sexy, louche behavior that could ruin lives. In fact, they seem most to have encouraged female viewers, potential It girls, to become actors. Many 1920s movie stars, all those friendly “pals,” seemed less talented thespians than they did cute, clever girls. How hard could it be? As early as 1920, the Department of Labor estimated that 14,354 young women listed their occupation as “actress.” And so “actress” entered the flapper pantheon, along with “showgirl” and “lingerie saleslady,” as something tawdry.
The first Miss America pageant, held in 1921, barred both divorcées and actresses from the competition and looked very closely at those girls dressed as flappers. Local censorship boards drew up laundry lists of things actresses, playing flappers, could not do or have done to them. In Port Arthur, Texas, one could not “make goo-goo eyes at the flappers.” In Pennsylvania, “views of women smoking will not be disproved as such, but when actresses are shown in suggestive positions or their smoking is… degrading, such scenes will be disproved.” In Kansas, no kiss could last longer than thirty feet of film,
and in Connecticut and several other states directors could not stage activity in a bedroom or a kitchen. How else to keep flappers, actresses—all these swarming sexual girls—in proper check? Their insidious influence was felt everywhere.
The backs of magazines were repositories of tiny ads promoting “French cures,” euphemisms for abortions, as well as paid testimonials to the miraculous “harnessing of vulcanized rubber,” a miracle product like Flubber. It could make a tire! Or a bouncing ball! More to the point, it could and would make a condom. By 1926, this latter item could be purchased in almost any drugstore or gas station in the United States, and it was widely known to be advertised in the Sears catalogue.
But the flapper—student, actress, or career girl—was not in most cases a sexual vixen. She was trying on a part and playing a tease. And she always learned her lesson. One of many films to teach it to her was called Wine of Youth (1924). We start with Grandma and the man who would be Grandpa, on the couch, happily holding hands. The screen fades and it’s the same couch, only on it now we see Mother and her fiancé, soon to be Father. Fade to the present, where Mary, the modern daughter and her modern friend Trish announce that they each plan to take what they call a “trial honeymoon.” No sedentary courtship for them. Together, with their fiancés, they plan a camping trip. Mary explains the point: “to know… how a man is in everyday life before you give your all.” But as it turns out there are things about the prospective grooms—how they look in the morning, for example—that a girl doesn’t need to know right away. She needs time to adjust. In the end, we see the same couch again. On it the modern couple, Mary and her man, is shown chastely holding hands.
