Rebellious Flapper Fashion

We don't think of young people rebelling against fashion or authority figures odd today, but did you know that the first real rebellion came in the 1920's? Long before teenagers were piercing their tongues or dying their hair purple and wearing black to shock their parents, flappers were shocking their parents, grandparents, and society in general. The decade earned its name "The Roaring 20's"--people roared with laughter while drinking illegal alcohol in speakeasies, they roared down roads in new-fangled automobiles, and women roared to everyone that they were people too.

To understand how shocking flappers and their clothing were, you must first understand how women acted and dressed before the 20's. Corsets were invented in the 16th century and were worn almost continuously up until the 1920's. They began as stiffened fabric that made a dress have a different shape than the woman who wore it, but by the Victorian period, and with the invention of rigid steel boning, they shaped the body that wore them. The Victorian corset is the one that most people are familiar with-the woman who hangs onto a bedpost while a maid pulls with all her might on the corset strings so that the corset makes the waist as small as possible. This became so extreme that it made breathing difficult and sometimes a fashionably-corseted woman would grow dizzy or faint when she became mildly exerted. But this was okay, because it was thought that well-bred women (women from wealthy families, that is) were dainty and helpless; the Victorian man liked a woman who was helpless because it gave him the opportunity to rescue her and be a hero.

The death of the corset happened for a number of reasons, but the biggest seems to have been World War I. In 1917, the American War Industries Board asked women to stop wearing steel-boned corsets, because the steel was needed for the war effort. It is said enough steel was collected from American corsets to build two battleships!

As the war ended, suffrage (the movement to allow women to vote) kicked into high gear. It had existed before the war, but as time went on, more and more women were asking, "Why can't I vote?" The general male response (although not all men were against women voting) was "You are too uneducated/weak/stupid to vote." Some argued from the Bible: they said that because God made Eve from Adam's rib, all women were supposed to be attached to a man they were not separate or independent; also, Eve was created second because she was second to a man. Just as participants in the Civil War had once asked, "Is a black man a man?", so people in the late 1910's asked, "Are women the equal of men?"

Flappers not only tried to answer, "Yes, we're the equal of men!" with their voices, but they tried to show it in their dress and actions as well. Whereas smoking had been reserved for men for centuries, flappers took up smoking cigarettes to show they could smoke too. They especially liked to pose in pictures with a cigarette in their mouth! And the flapper drank the same drinks as men, including the new "mixed" drinks that people were inventing in their basements and illegal speakeasy clubs. Before this time, women did not go to clubs with men, and aside from wine with dinner, did not drink with them. A "good woman" never broke the law, but the flapper liked to break the law every Friday and Saturday night by going to a club that served alcohol! Also, a good woman only met men through her family and family friends, but flappers would meet men at the dance halls and speakeasies. It was the beginning of dating as we know it.

Women also changed their hair. For hundreds, even thousands of years in Europe, women wore their hair as long as they could grow it (and would wear wigs if they could not grow it long enough). Men sometimes had short hair and sometimes long hair, but women always had more hair and arranged it in elaborate braids, curls or poufs. The flapper, on the other hand, cut all of her hair off at ear-length. This became known as the bob. The point was to have a hairstyle that was unlike anything women had previously ever worn, and one that required little effort to style and maintain. The flapper was a woman who had things to do and places to be and she could do neither if she was taking an hour to style her hair.

Some women had been advocating shorter skirts since the late 1800's, especially when the bicycle became popular and people were interested in exercising for their health, but it was only with the flapper that skirts came above the ankle. In fact, the flapper's skirt came up to the bottom of her knee and sometimes over it. In some cases the skirt was short enough that her thigh-high hose were exposed. Or sometimes she wore knee-high hose or socks, or rolled her thigh-hose down enough to expose the top.

Besides showing off her legs and underwear, a flapper often wore sleeveless dresses. Short sleeves came into fashion at that time too. While women had exposed their arms in earlier fashions, this was almost exclusively done with eveningwear; the flapper exposed her arms and neckline in broad daylight. Previous generations of women had valued white skin, so they kept covered in the daytime, but the flapper moved away from pale skin in favor of the new movement to spend time outdoors "for health."

The flapper's dress was also very anti-corset. Having given up corsets for the war effort, many women did not want to put them back on when the war was over! The Victorian woman had corseted herself into an hourglass shape. The Edwardian woman had adjusted the corset slightly so that she had an S-shape look when viewed from the side, and then she added a bustle under her dress to make her bum look bigger so her waist would look even smaller. The flapper's dress threw shape right out the window. The dress's waist-where the skirt attaches to the top of the dress-dropped from the natural waist (where a woman is usually thinnest) to the hips (where she is usually the widest). Above and below the waistline there was no shaping to the dress at all. A woman didn't have an S-shaped figure or an hourglass figure; she had no "figure" at all. The flapper was totally against using clothing to force her body to look a certain way. In fact, she even hid whatever curves she may have had.

Dance also played a part in fashion-and fashion played a part in dance. Ballroom dances, like the waltz, were considered stiff and formal by the "new, modern woman." Those were dances for women in corsets who were unable to move much. In the 1920's, the foxtrot and the Charleston were all the rage, and they involved a lot of leg-kicking and shaking of the body and moving of the arms. This kind of dancing had been impossible for corseted women, so it showed off the new freedom of movement (and breathing!) that the flapper had. Shorter skirts were also necessary to make leg kicking possible. Also popular with dance dresses were fringe and beads. The entire dress might be covered in fringe, which swung back and forth when a woman danced vigorously and made her look like she was moving even more than she was. And beads flashed like little lights as the woman moved. Women before had been reserved in their movements and actions; the flapper did everything in her power to move as much (and as wildly) as possible and to show it off.

At the time, many people said that the flapper dress and haircut made them look mannish, but that's what the flappers wanted: they didn't want men to see them as separate, lesser human beings. Wearing corsets and fainting gave men the impression that women were weak and unable to take care of themselves, much less vote for president. The flapper did everything possible to get away from the image of a weak and helpless woman.

1. If you are a girl, how would you feel if you could not vote when you grow up? You could also not become President, Secretary of State, or be a politician of any kind. How would you feel if people told you that you weren't smart enough to do those things?

If you are a boy, how would you feel if your wife could not work and earn money? What if she hadn't even graduated high school? How would you feel if she couldn't drive a car and you always had to take her places? Do you think that things are easier for men now because women can do more things for themselves?

2. In the 1920's, there was a big difference between the way men and women dressed and acted. Today, what are some things that men and women both do that women would not have done in the 20's? In what ways do men and women still act and dress differently today?

3. Society had never seen anything like the flapper before--a woman who wanted to completely change the way people saw (and treated) women. Why do you think that the flapper emerged in the 1920's instead of in the 1880's? Why did women not demand the right to vote after the Civil War when black men were given the right to vote?