After some initial research, I have chosen to pursue the topic of flapper girls in the 1920s. After the end of World War I, a new era of popular film, and the changing values and behaviors of a group of American women brought to the American scene the image of the flapper. Though first used in a 1920 film called “The Flapper” starring Olive Thomas, the term quickly began to take on a shape of its own as young, primarily working-class, urban women began to step out of the home and engage in behaviors that they never had before – smoking, drinking, wild dancing, dating, and casual sex among others. Though the era of the flapper was not particularly long – their lavish, playful lifestyle could not survive into the Great Depression – the flapper defined a generation of young women. The flapper – and especially the comparison between the image on-screen as well as real life women – will be the focus of my paper.
The idea of the flapper is significant for several reasons. The “sexual revolution” in America did not occur until nearly 40 years after the first flappers went out to speakeasies and went home with men, and somewhere in between very different images of women became the standard-bearer of memory – images of the sacrificing woman giving up her husband and sons to the war in the 1940s, of the homemade perfection of Mrs. Cleaver. How did the flappers – girls in their late teens and early 20s in the third decade of the 20th century – become the women they would be 20 and 30 years later? What can the comparison between the flappers in popular films such as “The Flapper” and “It” and the flappers who ventured out to dance halls and speakeasies show us about how the culture of the flapper evolved, and what happened to it after the 20s ended?
While I am not sure exactly where my research will lead me or what I might end up concluding, at this point I would like to focus my search on working towards an answer to the question of whether or not the reality and the image of the 1920s flapper girls helped to lead to a culture in which the expression of female independence and sexuality was acceptable, or if it only reaffirmed stereotypes about uneducated, lower-class, promiscuous women and helped spur a conservative counter-movement that served to silence female expression. I will explore this using a comparison of the “image” of the flapper girl, through films and contemporary articles and criticisms, with personal accounts and more working-class views of women who identified as flappers.
One issue that may cause me trouble over the course of my research is narrowing my topic and, specifically, determining which sources are important and valid and which are not. It will also be difficult to balance the “image” of the flapper with the lives of real women, and determine which played more of a role in determining sexual mores and what later generations thought of 1920s women. It will might also prove difficult to avoid generalizing across ethnic, class, and geographical lines, if my sources come primarily from only one of those categories. In the end, I will probably need to focus my research on white, working class or middle-class women in urban areas, not because the other classes or types of women are insignificant, but because those will be the sources which are most prolific and most similar to the “image” of flappers in films.
I have identified several sources that I will use to begin my research. First, in order to explore the “image” of the flapper in popular film and media, I will be watching “The Flapper”, the Olive Thomas film that first used the term in America, as well as “It”, starring Clara Bow, who also became known widely as a flapper. I will also be reading some biographical information about these women and others in Hollywood to understand their lifestyles and determine if these celebrities had an impact on the lifestyles of average women. In order to examine to lives and perceptions of ordinary, non-celebrity flapper women in this time period, I will be doing research beginning with Flapper : a madcap story of sex, style, celebrity, and the women who made America modern by Joshua Zeitz, and Flappers, and the new American woman : perceptions of women from 1918 through the 1920s by Catherine Gourley. One other text that may cross the line between celebrity and ordinary women is Posing a threat : flappers, chorus girls, and other brazen performers of the American 1920s by Angela J. Latham because it concerns both amateur and professional performers, and though this may cause difficulty in determining whether the source of any information is professional or amateur, it may also be a valuable source to delve into that divide. For additional background, I will be looking at some of the short stories from F. Scott Fitzgerald, such as “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”, which concern women in the 1920s.