more refined topic - Jenni Ockelmann

Specifics
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. The term was first used in a 1920 film called “The Flapper” starring Olive Thomas, and it 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 newly public and provocative behaviors, completely breaking down the Victorian propriety of their parents. Some of the things most closely associated with flappers were makeup, particularly “ringed” eyes and dark lips and cheeks, shorter dresses that emphasized the straight, flatness of a woman’s body, and dancing, drinking, and smoking, along with looser sexual behaviors and more male-female contact. Though the era of the flapper was not particularly long – their lavish, playful lifestyle could not survive into the Great Depression – the flapper became America’s definition of 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.
Argument
While I am not sure exactly where my research will lead me or what I might end up concluding, 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, contemporary articles, and works of fiction, with personal accounts and tales of women who identified as flappers. At the same time, I will be reconstructing the idea of the flapper in her own words

Significance
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 women defined as 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 left their family homes to venture out to dance halls and speakeasies show us about how the culture of the flapper evolved?


Troubleshooting
It might 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 behaviors and sexual mores – that is, answering the question in each situation of whether life imitated art or art imitated life. It might also prove difficult to avoid generalizing across ethnic, class, and geographical lines, if my sources come primarily from only one of those categories. 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 may be most prolific. Additionally, these women are the types who may most closely identify with the white, middle-class/upper-class type of woman portrayed in popular film, and will be more crucial to my comparison. However, even in choosing this specific focus or type of woman, I will need to be careful not to over-generalize or limit myself in the way I think about women and those who identified as flappers. My major concern right now is narrowing my topic – I am working to find a specific angle or question to answer, but so far my research has not pointed me towards anything that will help me to drastically cut down my topic.

Sources
I have identified several sources that I will use to begin my research. 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 was also associated with the flapper image. 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.
Other primary sources that I have started to find (and hope to find more of) include diaries and letters of young women in the 1920s. Though many of these diaries and letters understandably come from older women, and many others are from married women who do not really comment on the flapper lifestyle, I am searching for a few solid primary texts from young women who may have their own comments about their lifestyle choices or habits.
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.