Six flappers who paved the way for independent women

by Judith Mackrell
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
4 stars
Anne Helen Petersen

For most, the "flapper" evokes images of finger-curled bobs, drop-waisted dresses and endless Charlestoning, like a scene from Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby on a loop. She's the spirit of the Jazz Age, with its connotations of excess and indulgence, a drunken decade before the sobering Depression. A caricature, in other words.

In reality, the flapper was a rarefied figure, limited to the urban, moneyed areas of 1920s America.

The Jazz Age was, indeed, a time of tremendous change for women. The advances of modernity made it easier for them to leave their traditional realm (the private sphere) and enter the world of men (the public sphere). On trolleys, at the movies, in department stores, women were out of the home and, most importantly, consuming - which, in a capitalist country, is what really marks you as a citizen.

Young women were leaving their rural homes in droves and moving to urban centres, where they lived with other women, worked as shopgirls and spent money on themselves. Most would eventually marry and return to domesticity, but this experience of independence was what truly marked them as "New Women".

But they weren't flappers, not in the way we think of them. True, many bobbed their hair; almost all took off their corsets. But few had the means to wreak the sort of societal havoc that sparked widespread anxiety among the Victorian generation. So where did the figure of the flapper come from? From the media, of course - as with the hippie or the goth, the media used high-profile women to amplify the flapper's existence and the anxiety that accompanied it.

A very small selection of women had the means, the visibility and the gumption to act out the sort of social and cultural rebellion that millions of women would modify and apply, on a much smaller scale, to their own lives. Six of these highly visible women form the core of Judith Mackrell's sprawling and addictive Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation. They hailed from all echelons of the 1920s social sphere.