Who Were the Flappers? The Women Who Rebelled

The word “flapper” can mean very different things, depending on whether one is reading a 1925 fashion magazine, watching a Clara Bow movie, or listening to a 1927 sermon. To a 1920s advertisement, the flapper was an ideal consumer: young, urban, single, with money to spend on bobbed hair, knee-length skirts, beaded dresses, and a cocktail at the new speakeasy. To a Hollywood studio, she was a profitable type — the type that would fill the movie palaces with audiences eager to see Clara Bow in It (1927) or Joan Crawford in Our Dancing Daughters (1928). To a 1920s conservative minister, she was a threat to civilization, a sign of the moral decline that justified the defense of the old-time American religion. The flapper is treated as a fashion type in flapper fashion and style and as a political figure in flappers and feminism; this page is about the people, real and imagined, behind the word.

The “Typical” Flapper

By the mid-1920s, when Americans said “flapper,” they usually had a fairly specific woman in mind. She was:

Young, usually between 15 and 25; the typical college flapper was about 19 or 20
Single; flappers were expected to marry in their early twenties, and most did
White; while Black and immigrant women also took up parts of the flapper image, the standard flapper was imagined as Anglo-American
Middle-class (or, in the popular imagination, upper-middle-class); the working-class flapper was the exception
Urban; the flapper was a city type, found in New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, and the larger college towns
Educated; flappers were disproportionately the graduates of women’s colleges or the daughters of college graduates
Financially independent, at least to a degree; many worked as secretaries, telephone operators, saleswomen, or teachers

The 1920s woman was also, for the first time in American history, a citizen with the right to vote. The Nineteenth Amendment had been ratified on August 18, 1920, and the 1920 presidential election, in which Warren G. Harding defeated James M. Cox, was the first in which women could vote in every state. The young women of the 1920s were the first American generation to take this right for granted.

Where the Word Came From

The English word “flapper” had been in use since at least the 1890s, where it meant a young girl whose shoes were not yet broken in. The word “flapped” referred to the way she walked in shoes that were too new, and it carried a connotation of immaturity and innocence. The British novelist E.F. Benson used the word in this sense in the 1890s and 1900s, and the British popular song “Flapper” by J. Lawrence in 1910 helped fix the meaning.

The American flapper of the 1920s was a different sort of creature. The transformation seems to have occurred in two stages. First, the word was applied to a generation of teenage girls whose loose, flapping clothing was held up as a sign of moral decline; the most notorious example was the brief fashion for “tail-less” dresses in 1913, which the British press condemned as indecent. Second, after the war, the word was applied to the new generation of young women who took up the short hair, short skirts, smoking, drinking, and dancing that the older generation found shocking. By 1920, “flapper” was the standard American word for this new type.

The American flapper was also a product of the First World War. The young women who had worked in factories, volunteered as nurses, or moved to cities during the war had enjoyed a degree of independence that the older generation of women had not had. When the men came home, the women were not all willing to give that independence up, and the flapper became the visible symbol of the post-war generation of women who would not.

Real Flappers: The Famous Few

The most visible flappers of the 1920s were the women whose names appeared in magazines, newspapers, and gossip columns. The first American woman to be famous for being famous was Zelda Fitzgerald (1900–1948), the daughter of an Alabama judge who married F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1920 and became, almost immediately, the model for the flapper in her husband’s fiction. The Fitzgeralds were the first American celebrity couple, photographed for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, written about in gossip columns for their drinking, their parties, and their fights, and, in 1924, the subject of a series of articles in the Saturday Evening Post titled “The Flapper Wife.”

The most visible flappers, however, were the Hollywood actresses whose films were the largest single source of the flapper image. Clara Bow (1905–1965) was the original “It Girl,” a Brooklyn-born former elevator operator whose 1927 film It made her the most famous actress in America; her bobbed hair, plucked eyebrows, and visible sexuality defined the type for millions of moviegoers. Louise Brooks (1906–1985) was the Kansas-born dancer and actress whose severe bob and provocative German films (Pandora’s Box, Diary of a Lost Girl, both 1929) made her a cult figure; her 1980 rediscovery by film critics was one of the great second acts in American film history. Colleen Moore (1899–1988) was the original “boy-girl” of the silent screen, a slight figure with a sharp wit whose bobbed hair and small breasts were held up as the new ideal. Joan Crawford (1904–1977) became the archetypal working-girl flapper, a former clerk and chorus girl who turned her tough, energetic screen persona into a 50-year film career. Anita Page (1910–2008), Dorothy Mackaill (1903–1990), Norma Talmadge (1894–1957), and Aileen Pringle (1895–1989) were other notable screen flappers of the 1920s.

Outside Hollywood, a few women became famous for the flapper life in other ways. Brenda Frazier (1921–1982), a Manhattan debutante, was photographed at age 16 in 1928 wearing $30,000 worth of jewelry, and the image made her the most photographed debutante of the decade. Sylvia Sidney (1910–1999), a New York-born actress, became the prototypical working-class flapper of the 1920s stage and screen. A’Lelia Walker (1885–1931), the only daughter of the African American haircare entrepreneur Madam C.J. Walker, became a Harlem hostess whose parties were the social events of the Harlem Renaissance.

The Class Reality

The flapper, in the popular imagination, was almost always imagined as a white, middle-class, urban girl. The reality was more complex.

The working-class woman of the 1920s had, in many cases, enjoyed some of the freedoms of the flapper for generations out of economic necessity. Working-class women in the industrial cities of the North — the daughters of immigrants in New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia — had long worked outside the home, had long worn practical clothing rather than the long skirts and corsets of their wealthier sisters, and had long been less subject to the Victorian moral code of the middle class. The flapper, as a media type, was partly a middle-class version of freedoms the working class had always had.

The flapper was also, in many cases, a farm girl who had moved to the city. The 1920s were a decade of massive internal migration, as the mechanization of agriculture threw millions of rural Americans out of work and the cities beckoned with new jobs. Many of the women who worked as telephone operators, saleswomen, and secretaries in 1920s cities had grown up on farms in the 1910s, and the flapper image was partly a transformation of the rural girl into the urban girl.

The flapper image was also, importantly, not typically the image of the African American, Latina, or Asian American woman. The flapper look was associated with white women in the 1920s, partly because the popular magazines and films were aimed at white audiences, and partly because the segregated society of the 1920s kept most Black women out of the venues where the flapper was most visible. Black women did, of course, take up elements of the flapper style; the Harlem Renaissance was in part a flapper-era phenomenon, and the women of Harlem and other Black communities had their own versions of the bob, the short skirt, the cigarette, and the cocktail. But the standard flapper was imagined as white, and the standard flapper look was advertised to white audiences.

The Flapper as a Media Construct

The flapper was, in large part, a creation of the new mass media of the 1920s. The fashion magazines — Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair, The Delineator — published photographs of flappers, advertised flapper fashion, and prescribed flapper behavior. The movie studios produced the films that made the flapper visible to the largest possible audience. The advertising agencies sold the flapper the products — the cigarettes, the cosmetics, the automobile, the radio — that the flapper was supposed to need. The publicity agents of the movie studios created the celebrity gossip that made the flapper’s most famous representatives into public figures.

The flapper was, in other words, a profitable type. A 1927 study by the Vogue magazine estimated that the flapper look was being imitated by about 4 million American women. The flapper was the first American woman to be marketed as a specific type to a mass national audience, and the marketing worked.

The Flapper in Real Life

The flapper as a real woman was, of course, very different from the flapper as a media type. The flapper, in real life, had to work, to get along with her family, to deal with the ordinary problems of being a young woman in the 1920s. The flapper in the magazines did not have to do any of these things.

The flapper’s real life was constrained by the same forces that constrained most American women of the 1920s. Marriage and motherhood were still expected; the average age of first marriage in 1920 was about 21 for women, and the great majority of women married by 25. The flapper was expected to be, in many respects, a transitional type — a young woman who would grow up, marry, and become a wife and mother. Many flappers did exactly that; Colleen Moore retired from the movies in 1929 to marry and have children, and many other famous flappers of the 1920s followed similar paths. The flapper was, in this sense, a stage of life rather than a permanent condition.

The flapper was also, in real life, more conservative than the magazine image suggested. Surveys of college women in the 1920s — most famously the Katherine Bement Davis study of 1925, and the Robert and Helen Merrell study of 1929 — found that most college women were still virgins at marriage, that most of those who had engaged in sexual activity had done so within the context of “petting” rather than intercourse, and that most had married with the intention of starting a family. The flapper’s actual sexual behavior was, in short, less revolutionary than the public discussion of her sexual behavior suggested. The story of the flapper fashion and the politics of the flappers and feminism are the other dimensions of the type.

The Flapper’s Legacy

The flapper did not last long as a cultural type. By the early 1930s, the Great Depression had ended the era of cocktail parties, and the Hollywood studios had begun producing more conservative heroines. The bob and the drop-waist dress remained in fashion for some time, but the woman who had worn them in 1928 was, by 1932, somebody’s mother. The second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, and the #MeToo movement of the 2010s, have both rediscovered the flapper as a symbolic ancestor, a woman who first laid claim to the personal freedoms — the right to work, to smoke, to drink, to have sex outside marriage, to make her own decisions about her own body — that later generations would take for granted.

The flapper was, in the end, both a real woman and a media construct. She was the product of a specific economic and cultural moment, the 1920s, and she could not have existed without the mass media, the mass consumerism, and the mass entertainment of the decade. But she was also a real woman, and the freedoms she claimed were real, even if her actual behavior was more conservative than the magazines suggested. The flapper is one of the most enduring images of the 1920s American culture, and the story of who she was — and was not — is one of the most important pieces of the cultural history of the decade.