Who were the flappers?

    The women of the 1920s made bold fashion statements that are the focus of an exhibit, "Flapper Style," running through Sept. 4, 2016, at the Kent State University Museum in Kent, Ohio. The dresses are daring: A satin fringed evening dress with rhinestones and pearls, another with silver bugle beads and a pink slip under a black lace dress. And to think these young women were from homes where mothers, grandmothers and aunts wore long, modest dresses.  
    But how did the movement start? Here is the rundown: 

     The word: 'Flapper" is defined in Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary as “a young woman of the period of World War I and the decade thereafter who showed bold freedom from conventions in conduct and dress.”
    The American Heritage Dictionary adds that the expression “flapper” was British slang for a “very young female prostitute.”
    It is unclear how Americans adopted the term, “flapper,” but the word was already in use before the 1920s. “Shortly after the closing shots of World War I, the word came to designate young women in their teens and twenties who subscribed to the libertine principles that writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and actresses like Clara Bow popularized in print and on the silver screen,” wrote Joshua Zeitz in the book, “Flapper, A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity and the Women Who Made America Modern.” (Broadway Books; 2009).

    The history: To look at the Kent State exhibit is to be dazzled by the abruptness of fashion change in the early 20th Century. One of the museum’s standing exhibits features a fashion timeline with long dresses that women wore only a couple of years earlier.
    These changes also paralleled the rise of the women’s movement. “Although the fact is not widely known, the ratio of male-to-female undergraduates in the United States was about at parity from 1900 to 1930,” writes Claudia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz, and Ilyana Kuziemko in “The Homecoming of American College Women, The Reversal of the College Gender Gap,” published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (2006). 
    Women attending American colleges adopted a less formal style. The flapper exhibit features a gym uniform worn by a Kent State student in 1929.
    The 1920s were a dynamic time for women and society in general. Women won the right to vote with the 19th Amendment in 1920. The Great War, as it was known, had ended, and Warren Harding was elected, promising a return to "normalcy." (He died in 1923, and his vice president, Calvin Coolidge, took office.) The economy, fueled by the growing automotive industry, was taking off.
    “By the end of the 1920s, nearly half of the American population owned automobiles, radios, and durable consumer goods such as vacuum cleaners and washing machines,” according to The Prosperity of the Coolidge Era on the Library of Congress website. Even the music that young people loved – jazz – was different.

      Icons:
     --Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, (1883-1971), is often credited as a key designer whose fashions became synonymous with flapper style. Her first shop opened in Paris in 1913, and her clothing was often made with low-cost jersey, recounts The Metropolitan Museum of Art website. It looked good, and Chanel continued using it, even after she started making money. “Her own slim boyish figure and cropped hair became an ideal,” the website added, “as did her tanned skin, active lifestyle, and financial independence.”
     --Gordon Conway (1894-1956), a woman from Texas who moved to New York at age 20, became a magazine illustrator whose work promoted the flapper image, according to The Rise of Women, part of Teaching the American 20s on the University of Texas website.
     --Zelda Fitzgerald (1900-1948), wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, is also considered an icon of the flapper age.  After publication of her husband's novel, This Side of Paradise, she was considered the inspiration for the character Rosalind Connage, recounts the Encyclopedia Alabama online. Interviewed in 1923 by the Louisville Courier Journal, Zelda Fitzgerald is described as “shaking a curly crop of honey-yellow bobbed hair.”  She said that the fictional Rosalind was “the original American flapper.” Her husband is credited with coining the phrase, “The Jazz Age.” (See: In House, University of North Texas: Who Coined the phrase The Jazz Age?)

     The Flapper legacy:  The period failed to usher in wholesale gender equity. In the late 1940s, as soldiers began to return from World War II, men outnumbered women at colleges. “A high point of gender imbalance in college attendance was reached in 1947 when undergraduate men outnumbered women 2.3 to 1,” according to the Journal of Economic Perspectives article (quoted above).
    But the flappers undeniably changed the way women dressed, once and for all. The Jazz Age signaled a shift in the way women were perceived and, more importantly, the way they perceived themselves.

     Sources:

• Cornell University New Student Reading Project:The Jazz Age.
• Encyclopedia Alabama: Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald.
• “Flapper, A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity and the Women Who Made America Modern,” by Joshua Zeitz (Broadway Books; 2009).
• Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2006: The Homecoming of American College Women: The Reversal of the College Gender Gap by Claudia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz, and Ilyana Kuziemko.
• Kent State University Museum: Flapper Style; 1920s Fashion, by Sara Hume (Kent State; 2015).
• Louisville Courier Journal: What a Flapper Novelist Thinks of His Wife, Sept. 30, 1923 (article found through Googlebooks). 
• The Library of Congress: The Prosperity of the Coolidge Era.
• The Library of Congress: The Presidential Election of 1920.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel (1883–1971) and the House of Chanel.
• U.S. National Archives & Records Administration: Featured Documents, The 19th Amendment.
• University of Texas at Austin: Teaching the American 20s.
• University of North Texas: Fun Fact: Who coined the phrase "The Jazz Age?"

     Related:

     The Great War's fashion transformation

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