The Flapper Movement: Women Who Rebelled Against Victorian Decades

When the journalist F. Scott Fitzgerald published his 1920 debut novel This Side of Paradise, the title character declared, “I want to be a flapper.” By 1925, when Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, the word had become so common that he could simply title a chapter “The Valley of Ashes” and assume his readers would recognize a flapper when she appeared. By 1929, when the silent film The Flapper (starring Olive Thomas) was already a memory and the new talkies were making a star of Clara Bow in It (1927), the flapper had become both a real woman and a media fantasy — a symbol of everything the 1920s were doing to the Victorian world that had shaped the United States for half a century.

The flapper was the most visible expression of the cultural revolution of the 1920s American culture. She was, depending on who was describing her, either the heroic forerunner of modern womanhood, the symptom of a national moral collapse, or a Hollywood invention. The truth, as is often the case, is some combination of all three. The full story of who the flappers were, the distinctive flapper fashion and style they made famous, and the complex relationship between flappers and feminism are explored in dedicated sections; this page provides the broader picture of the flapper as a social and cultural phenomenon.

Where the Word “Flapper” Came From

The word “flapper” did not originate in the 1920s. In Britain in the 1910s, a “flapper” was a teenage girl whose shoes were not yet broken in and who still “flapped” them as she walked. The word was used in this sense as early as the novels of the British writer E.F. Benson and in the popular 1910 song “Flapper” by J. Lawrence.

After the First World War, however, the word migrated to the United States and was applied to a new kind of young woman: one whose older sisters had worn corsets and long hair, and who now refused both. The American flapper was young — usually between 15 and 25 — single, and usually urban. She was also, in the popular imagination, white, middle-class, and almost always written about by men. The flapper was the first American woman to be marketed as a mass-cultural type, and the men who invented the type — Fitzgerald, Mencken, the Hollywood studios, the magazine editors — understood that the flapper was a profitable product as well as a real woman.

The Flapper Silhouette: From Corset to Drop Waist

The flapper’s most visible rebellion was against the Victorian silhouette. For most of the nineteenth century, American women of all classes had worn some form of the corset, a stiff, boned undergarment that pressed the waist inward, lifted the bust, and forced the body into an hourglass shape. The corset was reinforced, exaggerated, and sometimes (in the late nineteenth century) virtually armored in whalebone and steel. The Victorian woman was meant to look, in the words of one etiquette book, “as if she had been poured into her gown and allowed to set.”

The flapper, in the 1920s, abandoned the corset. The new silhouette was straight, tubular, and unashamedly boyish. Coco Chanel in Paris and the Hollywood studios in Los Angeles both promoted the new look. The waistline, which the corset had forced inward, was dropped to the hip, creating a long, lean line that made the body look like a column. The hemline, which had reached the floor in 1900, rose through the 1910s and 1920s until by 1927 the most daring flappers were showing their knees in public. The full visual story is told in flapper fashion and style, but the symbolic effect was enormous: for the first time in American history, the female body was visible in public in a way that the older generation found genuinely shocking.

The flapper’s hair was as revolutionary as her dress. The long, piled, ornamented hairstyles of the Victorian era gave way to the bob, a short cut that exposed the neck and the ears. The bob had been pioneered before the war by such figures as the dancer Irene Castle and the actress Camille Clifford, but in the 1920s it became almost universal among the fashionable young. To have one’s hair bobbed in 1925 was a public declaration that one had joined the modern world. Many women who bobbed their hair reported being snubbed by their mothers, hissed at on the street, or refused service in restaurants.

The Flapper’s Behavior: Smoking, Drinking, Dancing

The flapper did not just look different; she acted different. The 1920s flapper was the first American woman of her generation to publicly smoke cigarettes, drink cocktails, drive an automobile, and dance in public in close physical contact with male partners. Each of these activities had been, in the Victorian era, considered the privilege or vice of men; the flapper claimed them all.

The most controversial of these activities was probably the smoking. Edward Bernays, the pioneer of modern public relations, organized the “Torches of Freedom” publicity campaign of Easter Sunday 1929, in which he recruited a group of fashionable young women to march in the New York Easter Day Parade lighting up Lucky Strike cigarettes in public. The campaign was an effort to sell cigarettes to women, but it was also a deliberate act of feminist symbolism: the cigarette, in the visual vocabulary of the 1920s, stood for equality with men. By the end of the 1920s, smoking in public had become a normal behavior for fashionably dressed young women.

The flapper also drank. Before the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act made alcohol illegal in 1920, respectable women in much of the country had not drunk in public; the saloon, after all, had been a male establishment. After 1920, the speakeasy — the hidden, illegal bar of the 1920s — was a place where men and women drank together. The cocktail, a mixed drink that had been invented in the late nineteenth century, became the drink of the 1920s and gave the decade its characteristic beverages: the Bee’s Knees (gin, lemon, honey), the Sidecar (cognac, orange liqueur, lemon), the French 75 (gin, champagne, lemon, sugar), and the Tom Collins (gin, lemon, sugar, soda). The full story of the speakeasy, including the rise of the criminal empires that profited from it, is told in Prohibition and speakeasies.

The flapper also danced. The Charleston, an African American dance that had originated in the African American communities of South Carolina, exploded into the national imagination in 1923 when the song “Charleston” appeared in the Broadway musical Runnin’ Wild. The Charleston required partners to swing their arms and legs vigorously, kick their heels, and turn rapidly, and it was widely regarded as scandalous by older Americans. Other dance crazes followed: the Black Bottom (1926), the Lindy Hop (1928), and the more decorous foxtrot and tango of the early 1920s. The story of the music that accompanied these dances is told in jazz age music.

The flapper was also believed to have a new attitude toward sex. The most controversial claim was the existence of the “petting party”, a party in which young people engaged in extended physical intimacy without intercourse. The claim was controversial both because it suggested a level of sexual activity the older generation found alarming and because it suggested that the flapper had separated sexual pleasure from marriage in a way the Victorian moral code had forbidden. The reality, as with most 1920s scandals, was somewhere between the alarm and the propaganda: surveys of college women in the 1920s found that most were still virgins at marriage, but a substantial minority had engaged in “petting” without intercourse.

The Key Figures of the Flapper Era

The flapper was a media type, but she was also a real woman, and a small number of women became famous for embodying the type. The most important were the actresses, who used the new medium of film to make the flapper visible to millions.

Clara Bow (1905–1965) was the original “flapper” of the movies. A working-class girl from Brooklyn whose father had abandoned the family, Bow was discovered by a magazine contest in 1921 and brought to Hollywood. Her 1927 film It (the source of the phrase “It girl”) made her the most famous actress in America and the first star to be called a “sex symbol.” Bow’s appeal was precisely her unpolished energy; she was the working-class flapper at a moment when most flappers were, in fact, middle-class.

Louise Brooks (1906–1985), a Kansas-born dancer and actress, became famous for her severe bob haircut (which, in her case, looked almost like a helmet) and for her roles in two German films by the director G.W. Pabst, Pandora’s Box (1929) and Diary of a Lost Girl (1929). Brooks’s cool, sensual performance style, and her refusal to conform to Hollywood’s expectations, made her a cult figure in the 1920s and an object of renewed interest in the 1950s, when film critics rediscovered her work.

Zelda Fitzgerald (1900–1948), the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, was the first American woman to be famous for being famous. A former Montgomery, Alabama, socialite, she became the model for the flapper character in her husband’s fiction, the subject of gossip columns for her drinking, her dancing, and her affairs, and the only American woman of the 1920s whose face was as recognizable as her husband’s. (A more detailed portrait of these and other real flappers is in who were the flappers.)

Colleen Moore (1899–1988) and Joan Crawford (1904–1977) were two more Hollywood flappers whose bobbed hair, kohl-rimmed eyes, and sharp cocktail-party dialogue shaped the image of the type. Anita Page (1910–2008), Dorothy Mackaill (1903–1990), and Norma Talmadge (1894–1957) were other notable flappers of the screen.

In Paris, the designer Coco Chanel (1883–1971) had been promoting a similar look since before the war. Her boyish, jersey-fabric dresses, her costume-jewelry accessories, her use of dark skin-tone makeup, and her promotion of the figure of the “garçonne” (literally “boy-girl”) were major influences on the American flapper. The American fashion industry, centered in New York’s Garment District and in Hollywood’s costume departments, was quick to follow Chanel’s lead, and by 1928 the American flapper’s look was being sold in department stores in cities from coast to coast.

The Writers and the Backlash

The flapper was, in large part, invented by a small group of male writers. F. Scott Fitzgerald is the most important. The flappers of This Side of Paradise (1920), The Beautiful and Damned (1922), and the Tales of the Jazz Age stories (1922) defined the type; Zelda Fitzgerald’s later complaint, that her husband had stolen her material for his fiction, contained a real claim. The flappers of The Great Gatsby (1925) — Daisy Buchanan, Jordan Baker, Myrtle Wilson — are among the most famous fictional women in American literature, and they are all, in different ways, flappers.

H.L. Mencken was another important chronicler of the flapper. His essays in The American Mercury and the Smart Set in the 1920s treated the flapper as a figure of either liberation or comedy, depending on the essay. Anita Loos (1889–1981) wrote the most famous flapper novel of the decade, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), which sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was translated into fourteen languages. The novel’s narrator, Lorelei Lee, a small-town girl who moves to New York and lives by her wits, became a kind of flapper anti-heroine whose empty-headed malapropisms were read as sharp satire of the type.

The backlash against the flapper was as loud as the celebration. Ministers, doctors, and parents wrote worried books and articles with titles like Flappers and Philosophers (ironically, Fitzgerald’s 1920 story collection), Our Changing Morality, and The Modern Girl: A Study of Deterioration. The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s presented itself as the defender of “old-time American” womanhood against the flapper and the Bohemian. Katherine Bement Davis, the superintendent of the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills, published a 1925 study, Factors in the Sex Life of Two Hundred Women, that claimed to show the moral damage done by the new freedoms. By the end of the decade, even some of the women who had been most associated with the flapper image were walking it back; the silent film actress Colleen Moore announced her retirement in 1929 to marry and have a family, and the Hollywood studios began substituting softer, more maternal heroines for the sharp-edged flapper.

The Flapper in the World

The flapper was not just an American phenomenon. By the mid-1920s, almost every major country in the world had its own version of the “modern girl” — the German “neue Frau”, the French “garçonne” and “moderne”, the Japanese “moga” (from “modern girl”), the Chinese “modeng nülang”, and the Indian “modern girl” of the big cities. In all of these cultures, the same package of short hair, short skirts, public smoking, and visible sexuality was taken up by the same kind of young, urban, often middle-class women, and the same backlash from older generations followed.

The global flapper was a product of the same forces that were reshaping America: the spread of Hollywood films, the rise of the cosmetics industry, the expansion of office work for women, the public debate over the franchise, and the world-wide circulation of fashion magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vanity Fair. The flapper was, in this sense, the first American cultural type to go genuinely global, and her image can still be found in fashion advertising around the world.

The Flapper’s End

The flapper era was over almost as soon as it began. The Wall Street Crash of October 1929, the onset of the Great Depression, and the gradual change in the cultural climate that accompanied both brought the flapper to a quick end. By 1932, Hollywood was making movies about farm girls and frontier women, not about smoking, cocktail-drinking city girls. The bob and the drop-waist dress remained in fashion longer than the flapper herself, but the woman who had worn them in 1928 was, by 1932, somebody’s mother.

The flapper, however, did not disappear. She had introduced, for the first time in American history, a generation of women to the idea that they could live as they chose — that they could wear what they wanted, smoke if they wanted, drive if they wanted, and work outside the home if they wanted. These ideas would lie dormant during the 1930s and 1940s, but they would return with a vengeance in the second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, when the Equal Rights Amendment that Alice Paul had first introduced in 1923 finally gained serious political support. The flapper’s rebellious daughter would become the modern feminist; the flapper herself, with all her contradictions, would become the subject of historical study. A closer look at the political implications of the flapper’s rebellion is offered in flappers and feminism, and the story of the women who called themselves flappers is told in who were the flappers.