A flapper was a young woman known for her bobbed hair, visible makeup, daring fashion, and unconventional behavior. Her dresses were short and straight, her stockings were often rolled below her knees, and her shoes were flat or low-heeled. She challenged traditional societal and gender norms by engaging in behavior that was previously seen as unladylike, like publicly drinking, dancing, and smoking, and expressed her femininity and sexuality on her own terms.
These cards offer a humorous take on the behavior of flappers that many deemed shocking. Public drinking and smoking, for example, upset traditional feminine stereotypes.
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(left) Unknown artist, Valentine, c. 1929 (below) Unknown artist, Postcard, c. 1929
Though the flapper lifestyle wasn’t the experience of most young American women, the very idea of the flapper was enough to cause a moral panic. Ministers, society matrons, and even the U.S. Secretary of Labor decried “the flippancy of the cigarette-smoking, cocktail-drinking flapper.” Flappers were viewed as both silly and scary; dismissed and demonized in equal measure. They were said to possess “the lowest degree of intelligence” yet were also responsible for the decline of civilization (Zeitz, 6).
The 1922 article "The Countrywide Campaign to Curb the Flapper" relates the warnings of Mrs. Janet Richards, an outspoken opponent of “dames of modernistic twists”:
[Richards] has drawn a graphic picture of a guileless, fair-haired youth being pursued by man-eating ‘cuties’ with bobbed hair and stocking flasks. ... Gone is the day, says Mrs. Richards, when a young girl who had been raided for kisses by some overbold young man spent the rest of the day repairing the damages to her modesty. In her place is a creature who slithers and slides across the hardwood, puffs at cigarettes, drinks gin from a bottle and lures men into darkened corners where they can’t help themselves.
So terrifying were these “man-eating cuties” that the Chicago Tribunereported the Young Men’s Club of Evanston, Illinois pleading with a judge for “court protection from bobbed hair and short skirted girls.”
In contrast, silent film actress Colleen Moore, who helped popularize the bob haircut, declared in the same year that flappers were just girls who were growing up in unprecedented times:
She likes her freedom, and she likes to be a bit daring, and snap her cunning, little manicured fingers in the face of the world; but fundamentally she is the same sort of girl as grandmamma when she was young. The chief difference is that she has more ambition, and there are more things for her to wish for, and a greater chance of getting them. She demands more of men because she knows more of their work. She uses lipstick and powder and rouge because, like every small girl, she apes her elders. She knows more of life than her mother did at the same age because she sees more of it. She knows what she wants and what she is doing, all of the time—and she meets life with a small and an eager, ardent hope. [. . .] The flapper has charm, good looks, good clothes, intellect and a healthy point of view. I'm proud to "flap"-- I am!
In "A Flapper's Appeal to Parents," Ellen Welles Page expressed a similar sentiment, urging her elders to recognize the impact the war had on the younger generation: "The war tore away our spiritual foundation and challenged our faith. We are struggling to regain our equilibrium. The times have made us older and more experienced than you were at our age."
Not all of the older generation were swept up in the moral panic brought on by short skirts and bobbed hair. Cincinnati Judge Charles W. Hoffman, for one, praised the modern woman:
[She] is standing on her own feet, with the right to be free from the pretentious mastery of men, who had no reason, morally or mentally, and in some cases not physically, even, to rule her. ... Women of today are dressing with better judgment, acting and thinking more simply, more sensibly and better than they have in any other age of the world, in my opinion.
