Flappers and Feminism: Did Flappers Really Want the Vote?

In 1928, a young woman named Betty Friedan (1921–2006) was a 7-year-old growing up in Peoria, Illinois, in a middle-class Jewish household. Twelve years later, she would graduate from Smith College with a degree in psychology. Thirty-five years after that, in 1963, she would publish The Feminine Mystique, the book that is generally credited with launching the second-wave feminist movement in the United States. In 1966, she would co-found the National Organization for Women (NOW). In 1970, she would lead the Women’s Strike for Equality in New York City.

Friedan’s path from Peoria to feminist leadership is a useful case study for thinking about the question of whether the flappers of the 1920s were feminists. The flapper generation, born roughly between 1895 and 1910, was the first American generation of women to vote. The next generation — the generation of Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett, and Robin Morgan — was the generation that launched the second-wave feminist movement. The question of what the first generation passed on to the second, and what it failed to pass on, is at the heart of the relationship between flappers and feminism.

The flapper as a fashion type is treated in flapper fashion and style, and the women who called themselves flappers are examined in who were the flappers; this page is about the politics of the flapper, and specifically the question of whether the flapper’s personal rebellion against Victorian conventions was also a form of political feminism.

The Nineteenth Amendment and the End of the First Wave

The most important political fact about the flapper era was that it began at the same moment that American women won the right to vote. The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920, just seven months after the flapper era had effectively begun with the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise in April 1920. The flapper, in other words, was born at the moment when American women became full citizens.

The amendment was the culmination of a seventy-year fight. The first women’s rights convention had been held at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), Lucretia Mott (1790–1880), and a small group of other abolitionist women. The amendment had been the central goal of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), the leading suffrage organization of the early twentieth century, and of the more militant National Woman’s Party (NWP), founded by Alice Paul (1885–1977) in 1916. The amendment’s passage was a triumph for both organizations, and it was expected by many suffragists to be the beginning of a new era of political and economic equality for American women.

The reality was more complicated. The 1920 presidential election, the first in which women could vote, was won by the Republican Warren G. Harding in a landslide over the Democrat James M. Cox. Most observers, including the suffragists themselves, had expected that women would vote as a bloc for the Democratic Party, which had been more supportive of suffrage. The reality was that the women’s vote, to the extent that it could be distinguished from the men’s vote, was distributed much like the men’s vote, with no significant gender gap. The election was, for the suffragists, a disappointment — but it was also a confirmation that the new women voters were not going to be a single, easily-organized political force.

The Older Suffragists and the Flapper

The relationship between the older suffragists and the younger flappers was, in many cases, difficult. The older generation had spent decades fighting for the vote; the younger generation seemed to take the vote for granted and to be more interested in smoking, drinking, and dancing than in political action. The older generation had fought for economic and political equality; the younger generation seemed more interested in personal freedom than in collective action.

Alice Paul, the leader of the National Woman’s Party, was one of the most vocal critics of the flapper. Paul had gone on hunger strikes in prison to win the right to vote, and she regarded the flapper’s focus on personal freedom as a betrayal of the suffrage cause. After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, Paul turned her attention to a new goal: the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which she first introduced in Congress in 1923. The ERA was designed to guarantee equal legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex, and it became the central political goal of the National Woman’s Party for the next half century.

Paul’s view was shared by many of the older suffragists. Carrie Chapman Catt (1859–1947), the longtime leader of NAWSA, founded the National League of Women Voters in 1920 as a vehicle for turning the new women voters into an organized political force. Maud Wood Park (1871–1955), the first president of the league, devoted her career to the idea that women should use the vote to pursue the same political and economic goals that the suffragists had spent decades fighting for. The older suffragists, in short, did not see the flapper’s personal rebellion as a continuation of their political work.

The Flappers Who Were Feminists

The view that the flapper was not a feminist is too simple, however. Many of the women who were most associated with the flapper image were, in fact, committed to political and economic equality for women. The most important were:

Ruth Hale (1886–1934), the journalist and suffragist who, with her husband the journalist Heywood Broun, founded the Lucy Stone League in 1921. The league was named after the suffragist Lucy Stone (1818–1893), who had kept her maiden name after marriage, and its goal was to persuade American women to keep their own names after marriage. The league was a small but vocal organization that insisted that the personal act of taking a husband’s name was a form of political subordination.
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950), the poet and playwright who was the most famous literary woman of the 1920s. Millay was a Vassar graduate, a member of the Provincetown Players, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1923), and an outspoken advocate for women’s sexual freedom. Her poetry, with its frank treatment of female desire, was one of the most visible expressions of the new sexual morality.
Dorothy Parker (1893–1967), the poet, short-story writer, and drama critic who was one of the founding members of the Algonquin Round Table. Parker was a sharp critic of the double standard in American sexual morality, and many of her short stories and poems were about the ways in which the new sexual freedom was not equally available to men and women.
Anita Loos (1889–1981), the screenwriter and novelist whose 1925 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was the most famous flapper novel of the decade. Loos was, in her personal life and in her fiction, an insistent critic of the way in which American men used the flapper’s supposed “looseness” to take advantage of women.
Bessie Smith (1894–1937), the “Empress of the Blues,” who was one of the highest-paid Black entertainers of the 1920s and who used her songs to depict the everyday lives of working-class Black women, including their sexual and economic vulnerability.
Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), the novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist who would later write Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and who, in the 1920s, was one of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston’s fiction and anthropological work depicted the lives of working-class Black women in the rural South with unprecedented honesty and dignity.

These women were not the typical flapper. They were older (most were in their 30s by the mid-1920s), more literary, and more politically engaged than the magazine image of the flapper. But they were the women who did the most to make the flapper era a continuation of the older feminist tradition.

The “New Feminism” of the Late 1920s

By the late 1920s, a new kind of feminism was beginning to emerge, one that was more directly concerned with the new sexual and economic realities of the flapper era. The most important statement of this new feminism was the book The New Womanhood (1929) by the New York journalist Winnifred Harper Cooley (1868–1942), which argued that the older feminism of the vote had been too narrow and that the new feminism would have to address the new questions of sexual freedom, economic independence, and personal autonomy that the flapper generation had raised.

The new feminism was more individualistic and less collective than the older suffrage feminism. It was less concerned with the vote, which had been won, and more concerned with the everyday life of the new working woman, the new college woman, and the new married woman. It was also more accepting of the new sexual morality; the older suffragists had generally insisted on the Victorian double standard that required sexual purity of women, while the new feminists were more willing to accept that the new sexual freedom was, in principle, good for women as well as for men.

The new feminism of the late 1920s was not yet the second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, but it was a clear step in that direction. The new feminists were the immediate predecessors of Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Kate Millett, and the cultural work they did in the 1920s and 1930s made the second-wave feminism of the 1960s possible.

The Post-Suffrage Disillusionment

The most important fact about the post-suffrage era, however, was the disillusionment that it produced in many of the older suffragists. The 1920s were, politically, a conservative decade. The Republican Party held the White House for the entire decade, and the Democratic Party, which had been more supportive of suffrage, was unable to mount a serious challenge. The Red Scare of 1919–1920, which had begun in part as a reaction to the women’s suffrage movement and the socialist movements, made many of the more radical ideas of the older suffragists politically marginal. The Nineteenth Amendment had not, in short, led to the political transformation that many of its supporters had expected.

The most important sign of the post-suffrage disillusionment was the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment. Alice Paul introduced the ERA in 1923, and it was reintroduced in every Congress for the next 49 years. It was not until 1972 that the ERA was finally approved by Congress and sent to the states for ratification, and even then it fell three states short of ratification. The post-suffrage era, in short, did not see the kind of political and economic transformation that many of the suffragists had hoped for.

The Flapper’s Legacy

The flapper’s legacy for the feminist movement is mixed. The flapper, as a personal type, did not advance the political goals of the older suffragists; she did not vote in any distinctive way, she did not organize politically, and she did not, for the most part, see herself as a feminist. But the flapper, as a cultural type, did lay the foundation for the cultural changes that would make the second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s possible.

The flapper was, in this sense, a necessary but not sufficient condition for the later feminist movements. She showed, by her very existence, that American women could be more than wives and mothers; she could be workers, voters, drivers, smokers, drinkers, and sexual agents. The flapper’s personal rebellion against Victorian conventions was not, in itself, a political program, but it created a cultural space in which the political programs of the later feminists could take root.

The flapper’s legacy is, however, also complicated by her exclusivity. The flapper, as she was most often imagined, was white, middle-class, urban, and young. The flapper’s personal rebellion was not, in most cases, available to African American, Latina, Asian American, or working-class women. The Harlem Renaissance, which is treated in the Harlem Renaissance, was in part an effort to make the flapper’s personal rebellion available to Black women, but the standard flapper image remained predominantly white. The post-1960s feminism of Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, and Angela Davis would, in turn, insist on the intersectionality of gender with race and class — a critique that the 1920s flapper, in most cases, did not anticipate.

The flapper’s relationship to feminism was, in short, complex. The flapper’s personal rebellion was not the same as the older suffragists’ political program, but the cultural work that the flapper did in the 1920s was, in the long run, a necessary precondition for the political work of the second-wave feminists. The flapper was, in the most useful sense, a proto-feminist — a woman who claimed personal freedoms that the older suffragists had not, but who had not yet worked out how to turn those personal freedoms into a political program. The work of doing so would be the task of the next generations of American women.