Flapper (2 page)

“I will not go home to my mother,” Eugenia snapped back. “I am not going to apologize to any one for anything that I have done. I am not going to give up my acquaintance with Al Davis. My mother started the ball rolling, and I will see this thing through to the end.” With steely-eyed conviction, Eugenia declared, “I do not think they can send me away.”

Clearly uncomfortable with his role in the case, Maurice Spies, the deputy assistant district attorney, tried to reason with Eugenia. “Do you realize what this means to you?” he pleaded. “Do you know that you are in danger of being sent to some institution?”

“Well, I am the one that will be sent away,” she rejoined, “not you, so this is my business and not yours.”

Captivated newspaper readers were just getting acquainted with the strange case of Eugenia Kelly when, on the third day of the trial, in a sudden and disappointing about-face, the defendant yielded to the state’s demands and formally repudiated her lifestyle.

“I was wrong and mother was right,” she told the judge, somewhat unconvincingly, in court.

It seemed that, following a marathon negotiation session, mother and daughter had come to a mutual understanding, brokered by lawyers for Mrs. Kelly, as well as several Catholic priests who were longtime associates of the family. Realizing that her inheritance was in jeopardy, Eugenia agreed to cut off all contact with Al Davis and the Broadway crowd. In turn, her mother would drop all charges.

“Eugenia is not innately bad,” Mrs. Kelly assured members of the press. “She is a good girl, but she was
blinded
to a true perception of life by the white lights of Broadway.”

Her daughter agreed, summoning almost identical language in her apology to the court. “I realize now,” she admitted, “that I was dazzled by the glamour of the white lights and the music and the dancing of Broadway.”

It wasn’t enough for the magistrate, who was determined to use the case to issue a sweeping moral judgment from the bench. He ordered Eugenia to stand before him and, with court reporters working furiously to record his every word, tore into the young defendant for what must have seemed an interminable length of time.

“You come from one of the best families in the city,” he chided. “I can remember, as a young man, that your grandfather stood so high in this community that when men passed him in the street they lifted their hats out of respect to him. Your father was a high type of man, and one of the city’s best citizens. I am afraid you have acted a little foolishly. The best friend you have is your mother. Sometimes we may disagree as to what a mother says, but when we think it over calmly we realize all she does is for our interest and benefit. After you think this over you will realize that your mother was guided by the right motives in trying to do what she could to save you.

“I think you will agree with me in the end,” he concluded, “that she is entitled to a great deal of consideration on your part for bringing you to a realization that you were doing something that is not going to benefit you. Bear that in mind, please, and realize that, after all, your mother is the best friend you have. Will you promise to do that?”

“Yes, yes, your Honor,” Eugenia replied, though probably not without digging her nails into the palm of her hand.

Eugenia didn’t keep her promise for very long. Within the space of three months, she eloped to Elkton, Maryland—the North American capital of eleventh-hour marriages—with the recently divorced Al Davis. Sporting a plain suit coat and carrying a large bouquet of roses, the incorrigible Miss Kelly found that her reputation preceded her, even below the Mason-Dixon Line. In vain, she and Davis spent several
frantic hours trying to find a clergyman who would perform the ceremony until, finally, the Reverend Henry Carr, a minister who specialized in last-minute wedding ceremonies, agreed to consecrate their union.

The story didn’t end happily ever after. Two years later, as America made a fateful break with its isolationist heritage and sent the first round of doughboys off to the Great War, Eugenia Kelly quietly inherited her fortune. Before the 1920s were out, she and Al Davis had divorced.

By then, nobody cared. The guardians of feminine virtue and Victorian morality had much bigger problems with which to contend. Every girl, it seemed, wanted to be Eugenia Kelly.

It was the age of the flapper.

I
T’S NOT CLEAR
how or when the term
flapper
first wound its way into the American vernacular. The expression probably originated in prewar England. According to a 1920s fashion writer, “flapper” initially described the sort of teenage girl whose gawky frame and posture were “supposed to need a certain type of clothing—long, straight lines to cover her awkwardness—and the stores advertised these gowns as ‘flapper-dresses.’ ”
³

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.

An early reference in
Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary
defined the flapper as “A young girl, esp. one somewhat daring in conduct, speech and dress,” a designation that at least one eighteen-year-old woman in 1922 seemed ready to embrace. “Of all the things that flappers don’t like,” she boldly explained to readers of
The New York Times Book Review and Magazine
, “it is the commonplace.”
⁴
,
⁵

If historians still disagree about how and when the term came into vogue, by the early 1920s it seemed that every social ill in America could be attributed to the “flapper”—the notorious character type who bobbed her hair, smoked cigarettes, drank gin, sported short skirts, and passed her evenings in steamy jazz clubs, where she danced
in a shockingly immodest fashion with a revolving cast of male suitors. She was the envy of teenage girls everywhere and the scourge of good character and morals. Nobody could escape the intense dialogue over the flapper. “Concern—and consternation—about the flapper are general,” observed a popular newspaper columnist of the day.
⁶
“She disports herself flagrantly in the public eye, and there is no keeping her out of grownup company or conversation. Roughly, the world is divided into those who delight in her, those who fear her and those who try pathetically to take her as a matter of course.”

The U.S. secretary of labor decried the “flippancy of the cigarette-smoking, cocktail-drinking flapper.”
⁷
A Harvard psychologist reported that flappers possessed the “lowest degree of intelligence” and posed “a hopeless problem for educators.”
⁸
In 1929, the Florida State Legislature even considered banning use of the term
flapper
, so infamous was her character.
⁹

It’s easy, in retrospect, to lose sight of just how radical the flapper appeared to her elders. Until World War I, few women other than prostitutes ventured into saloons and barrooms. As late as 1904, a woman had been arrested on Fifth Avenue in New York City for lighting up a cigarette. It wasn’t until 1929 that some railroad companies formally abolished their prohibition against women smokers in dining cars.
¹⁰

Given how new the “New Woman” really was in America, it’s little wonder that she dominated the public debate in the 1920s. Throughout the decade, headlines reported terrible stories of young girls driven to ruin, like a fourteen-year-old from Chicago who committed suicide after her mother forbade her to don flapper wear.
¹¹
“Other girls in her class rolled their stockings, had their hair bobbed and called themselves flappers,” readers learned. “She wanted to be a flapper, too. But her mother was an old fashioned mother, who kindly but firmly said ‘No.’ So the girl put a rubber hose in her mouth and turned on the gas.”

N
OT EVERYONE THOUGHT
the flapper’s triumph represented civilization’s decline. Writing in September 1925, at the height of the Jazz Age, Bruce Bliven, editor of
The New Republic
, penned a lighthearted
profile of “Flapper Jane,” a nineteen-year-old representative of the youth generation and exemplar of the New American Woman who seemed everywhere on display in the years just following World War I.
¹²
Maybe “Jane” was real. Maybe she was the work of Bliven’s imagination. In all probability, she was a composite figure.

Her minister, wrote Bliven, “poor man,” condemned Jane as “a perfectly horrible example of wild youth—paint, cigarettes, cocktails, petting parties—oooh!” Her critics linked her with “prohibition, the automobile, the decline of Fundamentalism,” and any number of other sweeping social changes. She was one of those reckless youths who “strolls across the lawn of her parents’ suburban home, having just put the car away after driving sixty miles in two hours.” A “very pretty girl” made up “for an altogether artificial effect—pallor mortis, poisonously scarlet lips, richly ringed eyes,” Jane imitated the “swagger supposed by innocent America to go with the female half of a Paris Apache dance.”

To Bliven’s rhetorical question—“Jane … why do all of you dress the way you do?”—the young flapper replied, “In a way, it’s just honesty. Women have come down off the pedestal lately. They are tired of this mysterious feminine charm stuff. Maybe it goes with independence, earning your own living and voting and all that. There was always a bit of the harem in that cover-up-your-arms-and-legs business, don’t you think? Women still want to be loved, but they want it on a 50-50 basis, which includes being admired for the qualities they really possess.”

Ultimately, Bliven ventured that there was “a good deal more smoke than fire” in the flapper’s general conduct. Rather than evidence of a great unloosening of morals, she was proof positive that “women today are shaking off the shreds and patches of their age-old servitude. ‘Feminism’ has won a victory so nearly complete that we have even forgotten the fierce challenge that once inhered in the very word.

“Women have highly resolved that they are just as good as men,” Bliven continued, “and intend to be treated so. They don’t mean to have any more unwanted children. They do not intend to be barred from any profession or occupation which they choose to enter.… If
they should elect to go naked nothing is more certain than that naked they will go, while from the sidelines to which he has been relegated mere man is vouchsafed permission only to pipe a feeble Hurrah!”

To which, the editor concluded, “Hurrah!”

S
TRIP AWAY THE
sensational headlines and popular warnings of moral calamity and decay, even look past the coolheaded assessments of progressive writers like Bruce Bliven, and the flapper was a complex figure.

She was distinctly real, the product of compelling social and political forces that converged in the years between the two world wars. Gainfully employed and earning her own keep, free from family and community surveillance, a participant in a burgeoning consumer culture that counseled indulgence and pleasure over restraint and asceticism, the New Woman of the 1920s boldly asserted her right to dance, drink, smoke, and date—to work, to own her own property, to live free of the strictures that governed her mother’s generation.

Growing up in an urban environment that afforded Americans opportunities for anonymity and leisure, born in the era of mass production and mass reproduction, the flapper experimented openly with sex and with style. She redefined romance and courtship in ways that expanded and—sometimes unknowingly—contracted her autonomy. She flouted Victorian-era conventions and scandalized her parents. In many ways, she controlled her own destiny.

But if the flapper faithfully represented millions of young women in the Jazz Age, she was also a character type, fully contrived by the nation’s first “merchants of cool.” These artists, advertisers, writers, designers, film starlets, and media gurus fashioned her sense of style, her taste in clothing and music, the brand of cigarettes she smoked, and the kind of liquor she drank—even the shape of her body and the placement of her curves. Their power over the nation’s increasingly centralized print and motion picture media, and their mastery of new developments in group psychology and the behavioral sciences, lent them unusual sway over millions of young women who were eager to assert their autonomy but still looked to cultural authorities for cues about consumption and body image. Like so many successor movements in
the twentieth century, the flapper phenomenon emphasized individuality, even as it expressed itself in conformity.

The pioneer merchants of cool invented the flapper for fun, for profit, and for fame. In branding and selling her, they inaugurated that curious, modern cycle by which popular culture imitates life and life imitates popular culture.

By the mid-1920s, few flappers knew whether they were a grassroots or elite invention. Neither could they appreciate the steep price they paid for their new freedoms. In return for measuring the good life in material terms, they forfeited a degree of political and social power; in return for new romantic, heterosexual liberties, they lost some of the intimacy that women once shared with one another.

Above all, the history of the flapper isn’t just about America’s first sexual revolution, though certainly the New Women of the 1920s represented a dramatic break with traditional American values and ethics. Indeed, the flapper’s importance ranged far beyond the bedroom or the dance hall. Her story is the story of America in the 1920s—the first “modern” decade, when everyday life came under the full sway of mass media, celebrity, and consumerism, when public rights gave way to private entitlements, and when people as far and wide as Muncie, Indiana, and Somerset, Pennsylvania, came to share a national standard of tastes and habits.