Overview
Historians of the 1920s have described a “new
woman” who
emerged in
the decade—politically active, working for wages, and more frank about
their sexuality. Younger women in particular marked the course
that most women in the decade followed to one degree or another. A
useful point of entry for an examination of the changes for women in
the 1920s is
through one
individual closely associated with those changes: movie star Clara Bow.
Clara Bow was born in Brooklyn, New York in
1905. Her
parents were
extremely poor; her father
was a drunkard, and her mother sometimes worked as a prostitute to
support
herself and Clara while he was off on a spree. In 1921, Clara entered
and won a movie fan magazine beauty
contest. The prize was a part in a movie called Beyond the Rainbow
(1922 release); though Clara’s scene ended up on the cutting room
floor, once she became a
big star it was restored and the film re-released. After parts a couple
other films on the east
coast of the U.S., Clara traveled to Hollywood where she was signed to
a long-term contract by producer B.P. Schulberg
after Schulberg recognized her as a natural actress for the silent
films of the day.
Clara appeared in numerous films for
Schulberg—seven
released in
1924,thirteen in 1925, nine in 1926—before her big breakthrough in a
1927 film simply called “It.” Based on a story by Elinor Glyn,
a British novelist credited with
creating the “sex novel” genre in the early-twentieth century, “it”
might be loosely defined as “sex appeal” though it implied much more;
for
instance, “it” could be “a quality of the mind as well as a physical
attraction,” according to Elinor Glyn. In “It,”
Clara played a shop girl in the women’s lingerie section of a
large department store who wins the love of the son of the store’s
owner through the application of her “it.” “It” was one of a
series of films Clara
made in the years 1926-1929—films with loaded titles like Dancing
Mothers (1926), Mantrap (1926), Get Your Man
(1927), The Fleet’s In (1928), and Dangerous Curves
(1929)—which established her as the screen embodiment of the modern
woman—the flapper.
Flappers took their name from a tendency of
young women in
the
late-1910s and early-1920s to leave their galoshes unfastened
(“flapping” as they walked), and it should be stressed that Clara Bow
was not the first to portray a flapper on screen. A film called The
Flapper starring Olive Thomas appeared as early as 1920, and
other well-known film flappers before Clara arrived on the scene
included Colleen Moore, Bebe Daniels, and Mae Murray. But, especially
after “It,”
Clara was, as novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
put it, “the quintessence of … the term … pretty,
impudent, superbly assured, as worldly-wise, briefly clad, and
‘hard-burled’
[hard-boiled] as possible.”
Before looking at flappers’ style more
closely, however, we
should
look back at the ideal of female
beauty before the First World War, the so-called Gibson Girl. Most
famously depicted in the work of artist Charles Dana
Gibson, stereotypical Gibson Girls wore long dresses with corsets
tightly cinched around their waists
to emphasize the shape of their bust and hips. They also wore their
hair long—sometimes piled atop their
heads—in a style centuries old.
In contrast to the Gibson Girl, flapper
fashion emphasized
straight
lines, not curves. Hence flappers did not wear
corsets; in fact, sometimes they even wrapped cloth around their chests
to minimize the appearance of their breasts. Flappers’ skirts were
short, typically stopping just below their knees, and they rolled their
silk
stockings down just below their knees as well—when they wore stockings
at all. On top, flappers favored
horizontal striped sweaters or sleeveless blouses and long necklaces;
often loose-fitting, their
sweaters or blouses would further minimize the appearance of their
breasts. Finally, flappers cut their hair
short, in a “bob.” If Charles Dana Gibson defined the Gibson Girl, the
artwork of John Held, Jr., captured the flapper
look most effectively.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once asserted that “it is
rather futile
to
analyze flappers. They are just girls, all sorts of girls, their one
common trait being that they are young things with a tremendous talent
for living.” That has not stopped historians and others
from trying to interpret flappers, however.
One of the earliest attempts to analyze
flappers came from
pioneer
psychologist Sigmund
Freud. Although Freud famously described America as “a gigantic
mistake,”
Freudian psychology became a popular fad in the United States after
World War I;
his books were even sold in the Sears, Roebuck mail-order catalog,
making them
readily available to the masses. Regarding flappers, Freud declared
their style to be one that erased outward
differences between men and women—in a word, it was androgynous. Why?
Freud placed flappers in the context of the recently ended World War
and argued that, having heard rumors of homosexuality among the
soldiers in the
wartime trenches, post-war women believed they needed to compete with
men for men. Hence, they gravitated toward
fashions and hair styles which minimized the outward appearance of
difference—flat
chests, slim hips, short hair. This interpretation of flappers achieved
renewed popularity in the wake of
the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
A second interpretation of flappers stresses
the “cult of
youth”
which dominated many
aspects of life in the 1920s. One of the best known expressions of this
view came from journalist Frederick Lewis
Allen, an editor at Harper’s Magazine. Reviewing the 1920s from
the perspective of 1931, Allen found little to recommend the decade,
but he reserved some of his most caustic comments for women. The
women of the 1920s, he declared, “worshipped not merely youth, but
unripened youth. They wanted to be—or thought men
wanted them to be—men’s casual and light-hearted companions; not
broad-hipped mothers of the race, but irresponsible playmates.” F.
Scott Fitzgerald similarly argued that the younger generation peaked in
1922 and thereafter the Jazz Age “became less and less an affair of
youth. The sequel was a children’s party taken over by elders.” In
short, the cult of youth was not simply a fact of young people
dominating the social life of the period; it was a matter of everyone
wanting to be—or at least to appear—young, regardless of their age. The
point was captured in a popular novel,
Gertrude Atherton’s Black Oxen, which was made into a film in
1924 featuring Clara Bow in her first true
flapper role. The plot involves the existence of a process—a glandular
operation in the book, x-ray treatments in the
film—whereby grandmothers could be rejuvenated and once again stir
passions in young men. In the film, older people are
called “the undesired,” and “autumnal love” is described as “indecent,”
further underscoring the cult of youth.
Interestingly, both the androgyny and cult of
youth
interpretations
describe the
changes in women’s appearance and behavior during the 1920s in strictly
old-fashioned
terms: attracting men. In fact, however, something much more important
was happening.The United
States was experiencing an upheaval in manners and morals, its first
sexual revolution. And the flapper was at the
forefront of this revolution.
It began with women achieving the right to
vote in the
United States
in 1920 (the 19th
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution), the culmination of a long battle
stretching back to the 1840s, or before. Women throughout the nation
voted for president for the first time in 1920, disappointing some
activists by dividing their votes along the same lines as men. In other
words, there was no monolithic “women’s vote” for change in American
politics, and most of the women’s organizations responsible for
attaining suffrage (the right to
vote), in fact, closed shop after achieving that one goal.
Having invaded one previously male-dominated
realm—politics—women in
the 1920s made inroads in a number of similar areas, as well. In the
workforce, for instance, more than two million more women worked for
wages in 1930 than in 1920. Although that meant women still only
comprised 22 percent of the total wage labor force (up from 21
percent), two significant shifts occurred in women’s wage labor during
the 1920s. First, the type of work women did changed. Before World War
I women were concentrated in domestic service (maids, etc.),
agricultural labor, and
the clothing trades, especially dressmaking. During the war, shortages
of manpower opened new opportunities for women
in broader manufacturing and in office work. Then after the war,
although they lost most of the manufacturing
jobs to returning doughboys, women held onto the low-level clerical
jobs in offices. Interestingly, these clerical
jobs which had been rungs on the ladder to success—a way to learn the
business before taking
over—when men did them became dead-end jobs once women filled them.
Still, at least women had the jobs.
An important new area opened in which women
could work in
the
1920s—the beauty industry. As clothing styles moved in
more androgynous directions, women sought ways to underscore their
femininity. Cosmetics were one way to do so. Frederick Lewis Allen, for
instance, noted that if all the lipsticks sold in 1929 were laid end to
end they would reach from New York City to Reno, Nevada, a distance of
over 4300 km (2700 miles); Allen chose Reno specifically
because Nevada’s liberal divorce laws made it a logical destination, in
his mind, for consumers
of cosmetics. Estimates of the amount of money spent on cosmetics
during the 1920s range from $750 million to
more than $2 billion. With that amount of money being spent, the beauty
industry grew rapidly during the 1920s. In 1917, only two people in the
United States paid taxes on income or profits earned in the beauty
industry, but by
1929, over 18,000 firms and individuals in the industry paid taxes.
Many of these were women, because the beauty
industry meant opportunities for women as hair dressers, manicurists,
and sellers of cosmetics—and as owners of their own businesses.
A second important change in women’s wage
labor was that
more
married women worked outside the home. In 1920, 23 percent of women
working for wages had husbands, a number which had increased to almost
29 percent by 1930. As Clara Bow put it in one interview, “Marriage
ain’t woman’s only job no more. A girl who’s worked hard and earned her
place ain’t gonna be
satisfied as a wife. I know this, I wouldn’t give up my work
for marriage. I think a modern girl’s capable of keeping a job and
a husband.”
Finally on employment, it should be noted that
the flappers’
style
was more appropriate to the workplace than
that of the Gibson Girls, who were clearly stay-at-home women.
Flappers’ fashions deemphasized their womanly
shapes and provided greater freedom of movement for working, while
their bobbed hair was less likely to get jammed in typewriter keys or
caught in machinery than the long tresses of their pre-World War I
counterparts.
Women invaded another previously male space in
the 1920s,
the
saloon. Prior to the establishment of Prohibition, saloons—whether in
big cities or small towns—were very male and most often very
working-class places; women who
ventured into saloons were quickly labeled prostitutes, whether they
were or not. The 1920s “speakeasy,” however,
catered to both men and women, and its appeal cut across class, and
often even racial, lines. The threat that this
promiscuous mixing of men and women, middle and working classes, and
whites and blacks allegedly represented to the morals of the nation—and
especially to the morals of women—prompted even some Prohibition
supporters to seek repeal of
the law. But although repeal was achieved, there would be no going back
to the pre-Prohibition saloon.
Other behaviors in speakeasies similarly
prompted alarm in
some
quarters. For example, women who drank often smoked. By 1923 the
consumption of cigarettes in the United States had increased four-fold
in the preceding ten years—to
more than 63 billion per year—and much of the increase was ascribed to
increased smoking among women. Moreover, to
attract women (and hence men) many speakeasies featured musicians and
dancing. Popular dances of the 1920s were
described as employing a “maximum of motion in the minimum of space.”
These energetic dances—the Charleston being
the best known—brought male and female bodies into closer and more
intimate contact than traditional waltzes, polkas, or reels. And the
music was jazz, a form most associated with African Americans, a fact
which especially bothered many white critics who feared this “savage”
music would lead to indecent behavior.
Perhaps inevitably in this climate, sex lost
much of its
taboo
nature. Both men and women talked more openly about
sex, and the growth of automobile ownership in the decade gave young
people a protected space in which to “neck” and “pet.” A judge in
Indiana ven called the automobile a “house of prostitution on wheels,”
which was ironic since Henry Ford—who as much as anyone was responsible
for popularizing automobile ownership—disliked the modern trend toward
freer sexual expression. Still, Ford and others need not have been so
concerned. As historian Paula Fass notes, “an unyielding taboo against
sexual intercourse” outside marriage held in the 1920s, despite the
“vigorous experimentalism”
which characterized the sexual experiences of—especially—middle- and
working-class young adults. These were exactly the types of characters
Clara Bow portrayed in film after film. The effect was stated by
a 16-year-old girl in 1933: “No wonder girls of older days,
before the movies, were so modest and
bashful. They never saw Clara Bow …. If we did not see such examples in
the
movies, where would we get the idea of being ‘hot’? We wouldn’t.”
The coming of sound to movies and the onset of
the Great
Depression
spelled the end for both Clara Bow and the flapper. Scandal dogged
Clara in the late-1920s and early-1930s—“vigorous experimentalism”
characterized her life
off-screen as well as on—and she struggled to adjust to the “talking
pictures,” finally retiring from films in 1933. Similarly, some in the
United States wanted to blame the economic Depression on the frivolous
nature of life in the 1920s, and nothing better symbolized that the
flappers. In later years historian Kenneth Yellis described the
reaction against flappers this way: “When the flapper raised her skirts
above the knee and rolled her hose below it,
the naked flesh of the lower limbs of respectable women was revealed
for the first time since the fall of Rome; the connection of the two
events was not seen as coincidental.” Prohibition may have been
repealed in 1933,
but sobriety was the order of the day for women. Fashions became more
demure in the 1930s as skirts lengthened and curves returned (though
not corsets); bobbed hair went out of style. The flapper passed into
history.
Some people have criticized women in the 1920s
for not
translating
the
momentum of the campaign to win the right to vote into a coherent
political movement for change, diverting their energies instead into
consumption, drinking and smoking, and the general madness of the Jazz
Age. But it is somewhat unfair to criticize flappers for failing to
possess the sensibilities that would push women after the
Second World War into greater assertions of their rights. Women in the
1920s may not have become the political force they could have been, but
they expanded opportunities for women in many areas and reached for a
broader equality with
men. As film director Dorothy Arzner, who worked with Clara Bow on the
films Get Your Man (1927) and The Wild Party (1929),
put it: Flappers in fact did “a great deal to emancipate the women of
the world.”