The flapper is perhaps the most instantly recognizable figure of 1920s America, which is why it is surprising that this is the first anthology of stories dedicated to her. She was a controversial embodiment of modernity, of shifting gender norms, and the break with earlier codes of behavior. She symbolized all the newness of the post-WWI generation, of the age of Prohibition, jazz, speakeasies, motor cars, and mobility.
The term “flapper” was initially British theatrical slang for young girls, especially those who gushed over matinée idols. By 1912, it was being used in America to describe modish girls who wore the new style of non-girdled, low waisted dresses, tended toward slimness, and were heavily made up. By the end of the war, as soldiers returned, hemlines rose farther, and jazz’s popularity spread across the country, the “flapper” came to signify the young generation’s post-war mixture of jaded optimism and high energy.
Unlike the suffragettes before them, flappers were more interested in social and sexual equality than political. They traded the long hair, wasp waists, and corsets of the Edwardian Gibson Girl, so well suited for the drawing room, for bobbed hair, simple short dresses with rolled stockings that exposed the ankle and knee, and a straight boyish profile. This new style celebrated the speed and mobility of modern life and broke with the cumbersome expectations of the stay-at-home wife and mother-to-be. Flapper fashion was at one with the flapper’s lifestyle, which advocated for life on the same terms as their male counterparts (known as “flippers” or, later, “sheiks”). Why, the flapper demanded, weren’t women allowed to listen to jazz, drink, smoke, and be sexually active—at least active enough to “park and pet.”
From the late 1910s, more and more women enrolled in college and trade schools, the boom economy created a high demand for office workers and shop girls, and women migrated to cities and were able to support themselves (almost all of these stories take place in New York City, America’s capital of modernity). The flapper’s advocacy for social and sexual equality appealed to this new class of urban woman. But these expanding roles for women and the unregulated intermingling of the sexes in the urban spaces and on campuses created a certain amount of anxiety for the more conservative elements who saw flapperdom as evidence of the decline of American morality. This fear was only compounded by the 1920s fascination with youth culture and by prohibition—the speakeasy removed restrictions against the separation of gender, class, and even race.
As was true of the 1920s, the flapper phenomenon was neither simple nor homogeneous. This decade saw widespread and often violent division: Jim Crow racism, economic inflation and disparity, and tectonic shifts in mores and social behavior. The definition of the flapper itself changed over the decade and registered many of these turbulent aspects; so too do these stories. Herein you will find many of the tropes that have become synonymous with flapperdom: the heroine of “Clever Little Fool” struggling to balance her fast lifestyle with the expectations of marriage; a shy girl’s transformation into a flirtatious flapper by adopting snappy dialogue in “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”; the aviatrix in “The Bride of Ballyhoo” using performance and spectacle to further her career; a powder-room attendant in “Night Club” embodying the tensions between the older generations and younger. Yet these stories are far from univocal. Authors including Dorothy Parker, Anita Loos, and Viña Delmar skewer preconceptions of the flapper even as they rely upon them. Dawn Powell’s “Not the Marrying Kind” inverts and updates the romance formula for the modern girl just as the main character of “Something for Nothing” inverts the idea of urban sophistication; gold-diggers and chorus girls—extreme manifestations of flapperdom—appear in stories by African American authors, like “The Chicago Kid” and “Monkey Junk,” which make evident the decade’s wealth disparity and limited options for women—especially African American women. Whereas the flapper movement is largely and reductively identified with the white middle class, it drew inspiration from the jazz culture and the perceived joyousness of African American society, just then reaching its renaissance in Harlem, and the presence of blackness can be found submerged in many of these stories (not always positively) by white authors. (Indeed, the flapper movement’s proximity to black culture via jazz added to the larger white fear of cultural degradation.)
The flapper was a figure of both fascination and fear, of feminine empowerment and risqué sexuality, as the many chorus girls and gold-diggers in flapper fiction illustrate. She was debated from pulpit to press—but appeared nowhere more frequently than in the magazines of the day. By all accounts the 1920s were “magazine crazy,” with magazines catering to every interest and social position. The flapper’s merits were debated in middle-class magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, which had a circulation over 2,000,000 and helped propel F. Scott Fitzgerald to stardom. Her high-society position and fashion was glamorized in women’s magazines, which Anita Loos ironically lampoons here in “Why Girls Go South,” originally published in Harper’s Bazaar. She was championed in magazines like College Humor, which captured the fast quip- and slang-laden dialogue of youth culture (and which Dorothy Parker’s “Mantle of Whistle” hilariously sends up), and in the working-class pulp magazines, such as Snappy Stories which provides five of the thirteen stories in this collection and launched the careers of Dawn Powell, Katharine Brush, and Viña Delmar. These light, entertaining, mildly risqué stories were the reading material for those same typists, stenographers and shop girls who saw themselves reflected in the magazine’s working-class heroines even while their fantasies of upward mobility were enacted by the many high-society heroines as well. The importance of these magazines can be seen in stories like Delmar’s “Thou Shalt Not Killjoy” where a naughty pulp magazine demolishes the hold nineteenth-century morality has on the flapper’s prissy love interest.
Unfortunately, there were no pulp magazines for African Americans, so flapper fiction for a black audience and by black authors like Gertrude Schalk, Rudolph Fisher, and Zora Neale Hurston, all represented here, was published in black newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier and the National News, illustrating the important but often overlooked interrelationships between African American culture and white flapperdom.
With this collection, the largely lost genre of popular fiction that defined the flapper in the popular consciousness of the 1920s is brought vividly back to life, as is the flapper herself—complex, unapologetic, and as jazzy as ever.