The catchy and popular jazz music was controversial. Above all, it was a symbol of multicultural society, which had many gloomy critics. The Norwegian economy professor Knud A.
Jazz testified that man was on his way back to the animal stage of evolution, he said. While girls shook butt to the popular music, the critics prophesised a cultural crisis and demise. Serious, pessimistic men feared that party culture, materialism and new gender roles would lead to family disintegration, societal depravity and the fall of the white race.
The flapper phenomenon was transnational. In particular, the short hair was iconic for the era. Advertising in the art deco style portrayed androgynous and decadent female figures with veiled, flirtatious faces. Then came the cigarette brands just for women and advertisements showed girls as confident and independent.
The title character, Ginger, was a wayward girl who flouted the rules of society. Played by Olive Thomas, a former Ziegfeld Girl left , Ginger had so much fun that a generation of lonely young women wanted to be like her. Another role model was stage and screen actress Louise Brooks right , who also modeled for artists and fashion designers. She was the inspiration for the flapper comic strip Dixie Dugan.
Clara Bow wasn't the first flapper on screen, but she was certainly a role model for young women of the era. She didn't play by the rules, and was tabloid fodder for years for her sexual escapades with the biggest movie stars of the time.
Bow's first film was in and her career peaked in with the film It. Bow's fans wanted "it", so they copied her look and behavior. The rise of the automobile was another factor in the rise of flapper culture. There is the semi-flapper; the flapper; the superflapper. Each of these three main general divisions has its degrees of variation. I might possibly be placed somewhere in the middle of the first class.
I wonder if it ever occurred to any of you that it required brains to become and remain a successful flapper? Indeed it does! It requires an enormous amount of cleverness and energy to keep going at the proper pace.
It requires self- knowledge and self-analysis. We must know our capabilities and limitations. We must be constantly on the alert. Attainment of flapperhood is a big and serious undertaking! The Flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub-deb-ism, bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into the battle. She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do.
Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim and most of all to heart. She was the first advertising executive to push sex appeal as a method of marketing to women, often focused on getting male attention.
The books focused on flapper Lorelei Lee and her male conquests. The popularity of movies exploded during the s, though the screen versions of flappers were typically less permissive than the real world versions. Nonetheless, the image of Brooks and her precise bob has become the archetypal vision of a flapper. The Hollywood portion of her film career featured several starring flapper roles before she moved on to more serious dramas.
Bow was the most successful screen flapper, beloved for the unpretentious manner of her portrayals and her frank sex appeal. Anna May Wong broke barriers as the first Chinese-American movie star. Her image as a flapper off-screen was encouraged by movie studios to increase her appeal beyond the exotic roles in which they cast her. Dancing was a crucial part of flapper culture.
The Charleston and the Black Bottom were popular and considered more suggestive than any moves that had come before. Women who populated beaches in bathing suits that were deemed inappropriate were escorted off the beach by police or arrested if they refused. Popular Washington , D. John B. Clergymen like Rabbi Stephen S.
Wise and Baptist pastor Dr. The age of the flapper came tumbling down suddenly on October 29, , with the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression. No one could afford the lifestyle any longer, and the new era of frugality made the freewheeling hedonism of the Roaring Twenties seem wildly out of touch with grim new economic realities. Many film-star flappers had already met their end two years earlier with the advent of talking film, which was not always kind to them.
The Hays Code in , which severely limited sexual themes in movies, made independent women in the flapper mold almost impossible to portray onscreen. Joshua Zeitz. Kelly Boyer Sagert. Flappers and the New American Woman.
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