Historiography
Flappers, or the “new women” of the 1920s, can
be
found discussed in many places, though few books focus exclusively on
them. The leading exception is Joshua Zeitz, Flapper: A Madcap
Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women who Made America Modern
(New York: Crown Publishers, 2006), which emphasizes not only women’s
agency in creating the flapper but also the
influence of advertisers who exploited the modern woman for their own
ends. Older, but still valuable, are
articles by Kenneth A. Yellis, “Prosperity’s Child: Some Thoughts on
the
Flapper,” American Quarterly 21 (1969): 44-64, and Gerald
Critoph, “The Flapper and Her Critics” in “Remember the Ladies”:
New Perspectives on Women in American History, Carol V.R. George,
ed. (Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, 1975), 145-160. And for a broader
examination of youth in the 1920s with a particular focus
on women, see Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American
Youth in the 1920’s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
More commonly, flappers appear in broader
histories of the
Jazz Age
or of women. The best of these
is Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and
Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill and Wang,
1995), especially Chapter 3 “The New Woman.” Useful chapters on
flappers—sometimes in the context of broad social change,
other times as part of women’s politics and feminism—also appear in
William E.
Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-1932 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1958), Chapter 9
“The Revolution in Morals”; Michael E. Parrish, Anxious Decades:
America in Prosperity and Depression, 1920-1941 (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1992), Chapter 7 “Fortunes of Feminism”; Ronald Allen Goldberg,
America
in the Twenties (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003),
Chapter 5 “A New Culture Emerges”; and Nathan Miller, New World
Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America (Cambridge, MA:
Da Capo Press, 2004), Chapter 12 “Runnin’ Wild.” Strangely, given its
title, flappers do not feature at all in Stanley Coben, Revolt
Against Victorianism: The Impetus for Cultural Change in 1920s America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
A good chapter on flapper fashion appears in
Angela J.
Latham, Posing
a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen Performers of the
American 1920s (Hanover, NH: University Press of New
England, 2000), Chapter 2. Other useful and important works on flappers
include Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The
New Woman as Androgyne: Social Disorder and Gender Crisis, 1870-1936”
in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in
Victorian America, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, ed. (1985): 245-296,
which perhaps takes the androgyny argument to its limit, and Estelle B.
Freedman, “The New Woman: Changing Views of Women in the 1920s,” Journal
of American History, 61 (Sep., 1974): 372-393, which is critical of
both the way scholars have treated the women of the 1920s
and the failure of the “new woman” to push through and achieve full
political equality with men. And see John C.
Burnham, “The Progressive Era Revolution in American Attitudes Toward
Sex,” Journal of American History, 59 (March 1973): 885-908,
which argues that the first American sexual revolution actually began
before the flapper.
For women and work in the 1920s, the starting
place is still
Alice
Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A
History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1982), Chapter 8. A number of industries with
concentrations of female workers—and how those concentrations developed
over time—have been the subject of individual monographs. Some of the
best include: Margery W. Davies, A Woman’s Place Is at the
Typewriter: Office Work and Office Workers, 1870-1930
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Susan Porter Benson, Counter
Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department
Stores, 1890-1940 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1986);
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, et al., Like a Family: The Making of a
Southern Cotton Mill World (New York: Norton, 1989); and Elizabeth
Clark-Lewis, Living in, Living out: African American Domestics in
Washington, D.C., 1910-1940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1994).
Finally, much of what has been written about
Clara Bow is
notoriously unreliable. The best, most reliable source is David Stenn, Clara
Bow:
Runnin’ Wild (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000; orig. 1988).