Age of the Flapper

The older generation of suffragists were appalled, let alone the good folk of Middletown America. The flapper made her mark in this postwar and pre-Crash of ‘29 era, flouting convention, throwing caution to the wind, and, ultimately, rejecting in toto the confinements of a patriarchal society still oblivious to the 19th Amendment. There she was in the smoke-filled jazz club late at night, with cigarette in hand, gaily laughing in the company of men, a queen of dalliance neither quite urbane nor exactly meretricious, self-absorbed, and exuding a new kind of sexuality, a strange cocktail of boyishness and coquetry. She’s left behind that awful tight-laced corset, that torture device of men. For that matter, she’s done away with the bustles, wasp waists, layers of undergarments, and the archaic image of femininity as a domesticated breeding machine. No more restraining clothing. She hid her breasts, cut her hair short, and let her black skirt just hang from the shoulders. Bare arms, knee-high skirts, rolled-down stockings for the modern woman of the Roaring Twenties. But above all, Jazz, gotta love that Jazz!