Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (2 page)

In Tsarist Russia, where Tamara had grown up, she had been cocooned in a life of pleasure and privilege. But when the 1917 revolution had smashed that life apart she had been forced into exile with her husband and small child. Living in a small hotel room in Paris she’d had no skills with which to support herself other than a relatively untutored gift for painting and an undaunted sense of her own entitlement. By the late 1920s she had used both to recreate herself as one of the most fashionable artists of the new decade.

Tamara’s most celebrated canvases were of her contemporaries, young women whose bodies radiated a lustre of sexual independence as redolent of 1920s style as Josephine’s dancing. In fact, Tamara always claimed an affinity with Josephine, even though she never attempted to paint her: ‘The woman made everyone who watched her weak with desire for her body. She already looked like one of my paintings, so I could not ask her to pose.’
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Another admirer of Josephine’s dancing was the poet and heiress Nancy Cunard. She, too, had left her home in England to settle in Paris, but while she frequented the same circuit of nightclubs, bars and parties as Tamara, her closest ties were with the Parisian avant-garde. That autumn she was disentangling herself from an affair with the Dadaist Tristan Tzara and falling in love with Louis Aragon, one of the founders of surrealism.

Nancy had grown up a lonely, bookish little girl but her antagonism towards her socially voracious mother had hardened her determination to make a new life for herself in Paris. Eight years later, her transformation from English heiress to Left Bank radical would appear complete. Her hair was sharply cropped, her eyes outlined with kohl, her arms loaded to the elbow with ivory and ebony bangles, and among her long list of lovers would be a black jazz pianist from Georgia.

Also in Paris during the mid-1920s was Zelda Fitzgerald. Originally a small-town Southern belle from Alabama, her ‘slender supple’ grace and ‘spoiled alluring mouth’ had famously become the template from which her husband, the novelist Scott Fitzgerald, created his exquisitely modern heroines.
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Her former childhood friend Tallulah Bankhead had much admired Zelda, feeling herself to be the plump and truculent ugly duckling of her own Southern family, but at the age of fifteen Tallulah had starved herself into beauty and won a minor film role in a magazine competition. From there she progressed to a career on Broadway and in London’s West End where, by 1925, she had become a star. Brash, witty and luxuriantly pretty, Tallulah was a novelty on the London stage.

No less exotic to American audiences was the very English, very aristocratic Lady Diana Cooper, who during the mid-1920s was touring the States in Max Reinhardt’s theatrical spectacle
The Miracle.
As the youngest daughter of the 8th Duke of Rutland, Diana was only one rung below royalty and as such had grown up in a gilded cage, from which she was expected to emerge on the arm of a rich and titled husband. When she fell in love with a man who possessed neither money nor rank, she broke with centuries of tradition. She had committed herself to earning the money that would launch her husband in politics and had done so by embarking on a career that a generation earlier would have risked social disgrace.

By the autumn of 1925 all six of these women were travelling to places far beyond those that they, or anyone else, could have envisioned. They didn’t do so as a recognizable group, although their lives intersected in many ways. But the journeys they took were emblematic of larger changes that were taking place around them, and which were throwing the lives and expectations of women into profoundly different configurations.

To the public eye, these changes were sufficiently vivid to inspire the branding of a new breed of women – the much demonized and much mythologized ‘flapper’. Like Ardita Farnam,
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one of Scott Fitzgerald’s early heroines, the flapper seemed to be motivated by a single aim: ‘to live as I liked always and to die in my own way’. Riding the transforming dynamic of the 1920s she was seen to demand everything that had been denied her mother, from choosing her own sexual relationships and earning her own living, to cutting her hair, shortening her skirts and smoking cigarettes in public.

For Diana, the oldest of the women in this book, the determination to ‘live as I liked’ was rooted in the harrowing dislocations of the war years. As traditional rules of class were suspended she found the nerve to defy her family, first to volunteer as a nurse, then to claim the marriage and career of her choice. Nancy, too, used the war to carve out her own rebellion, but she would push far beyond Diana in embracing the most radical elements of the Twenties’ experiment in art, fashion and lifestyle. Tamara, Tallulah and Zelda also journeyed remarkable distances during the decade, but they not only embodied the flapper through the spirit of their personal lives they gave her a very public stamp – Tamara in the women she painted, Tallulah in the characters that she portrayed on stage and Zelda in the fictional heroines created by Scott, and eventually by herself. As for Josephine, who became internationally famous as the physical incarnation of jazz, and the free syncopated energy of the Twenties, she made the most remarkable journey of all as she transcended the poverty of her childhood to become an icon of black music, and modernist art.

Of course, the six women in this book experienced the 1920s in exceptional ways. But what made them emblematic of their time was the spirit of audacity with which they reinvented themselves. The young women of this era weren’t the first generation in history to seek a life beyond marriage and motherhood; they were, however, the first significant group to claim it as a right. And from the way the flapper was written about and represented it was clear that, to many, she represented a profound social threat.

During the late nineteenth century the term flapper had still carried a suggestion of innocence, evoking the image of gawky, unfledged teenage girls, but even by the end of the war the term was acquiring connotations of brashness and defiance. In October 1919,
The Times
published a column about the new flapper, warning of the restive mood that was brewing among Britain’s young female population. Two million of them had taken paid work during the war and a substantial number were determined to remain in employment, despite pressures to relinquish their jobs to returning soldiers. The following year, the same paper went on to question the wisdom of extending voting rights to women under thirty, dismissing them as a single feckless type, the ‘frivolous scantily-clad, jazzing flapper … to whom a dance, a new hat or a man with a car is of more importance than the fate of nations.’
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Given the terrible decimation of Britain’s young men during the war, newspapers also bristled with warnings of the destabilizing effect these flappers might have on the country, as an unprecedented generation of unmarried and independent women appeared to be hell-bent on having their own way.

In France, women would have to wait until 1944 to get the vote; however that didn’t inhibit the power of this post-war generation to dismay and disturb. Victor Margueritte’s 1922 novel
La Garçonne
created a national scandal (and sold half a million copies) by recounting the adventures of his heroine, Monique, after she has ditched her worthless fiancé to embrace a life of lesbianism, drugs and single motherhood.

At the beginning of the decade the fascinating, defiant flapper was a type more read about in novels and newspapers than encountered on the street, but within a few years, she’d become the image to which hundreds of thousands of ordinary young women aspired. Fitzgerald satirized these would-be flappers in his description of Catherine, a minor character in his novel
The Great Gatsby:
‘… a slender worldly girl of about thirty, with a solid, sticky bob of red hair, and a complexion powdered milky white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle … When she moved about there was an incessant clinking as innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and down upon her arms.’
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Catherine exists in the novel only as a construction of flapper accessories and style; and to Fitzgerald in 1925 she symbolized the degree to which the transforming dream of the 1920s was fuelled as much by economics, the appetite for consumption, as it was by the lure of freedom. Within the competitive climate of post-war capitalism the new fun-seeking flapper with her dyed hair, bee-stung lips and Charleston frocks was proving to be a wonderful opportunity for business.

After a short post-war decline, the number of working women had risen sharply across the Western world (up to 500 per cent in parts of America), and those who were young and financially independent were opening up a lucrative market for the beauty and fashion industries. They were targeted with new brands of cosmetics and depilatories; with skin treatments that promised the rejuvenating magic of crushed almonds, pine bark, rose oil and hydrogen peroxide. Celebrities like Josephine were paid large sums to endorse them, for the profits to be made were immense. In 1915 American advertisers invested just $1.5 million in the beauty industry; by 1930 that sum had multiplied by ten. In 1907 the French chemist Eugène Schueller patented a new hair dye, which by 1930 had launched him and his company, L’Oréal, into one of France’s most lucrative enterprises.

Never before had so many ordinary women been told that it was their right to look lovely. Dieting fads and slimming pills flooded the market, all promising to produce the narrow-hipped, flat-chested flapper silhouette. Before the war few respectable women smoked, but numbers rocketed when cigarettes were rebranded as a route to slenderness. In 1927 Lucky Strike launched an ad campaign that featured the actress Constance Talmadge with a cigarette in her hand. The accompanying slogan, ‘Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet’, generated a 300 per cent rise in sales.

The fashion industry entered a similar boom. With designers like Coco Chanel and Jean Patou pioneering narrow shift dresses and short skirts, it was possible for modern technologies to imitate their designs with unparalleled cheapness and speed. (In 1913 an average of twenty square yards of fabric went into the making of a dress; by 1928 that had been scaled down to seven.) Garments created in a French atelier could be run up in factories and sold through shops, department stores and mail order catalogues on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Madelaine Vionnet was the first of the European couturiers to make ready-to-wear designs that could be shipped direct to America. For those uncertain how to wear the new styles, a barrage of tips were available in women’s magazines and newspaper columns. It was, in theory, a liberating democracy, yet the pressure to be fashionable brought its own miseries. As early as 1920 Fitzgerald wrote about the plight of a socially maladroit girl who is persuaded to cut off her one beautiful asset, her long hair.
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In real life, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago tried to gas herself because ‘other girls in her class rolled their stockings, had their hair bobbed and called themselves flappers’, and she alone was refused permission by her parents.
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To some contemporary commentators this addiction to style was the mark of a superficial and self-absorbed generation. Samuel Hopkins Adams, in the foreword to his 1923 bestseller
Flaming Youth,
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anatomized the flapper as ‘restless and seductive, greedy, discontented, unrestrained, a little morbid, more than a little selfish’. As she casually spent her money on a new powder compact or string of beads she also seemed shockingly a-political. She seemed oblivious of the battles that had so recently been fought on her behalf: the right to control her own wealth, to vote and to enter professions like the law. Even to wear the clothes of her choice. For decades, adherents of the British Rational Dress Society
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– or the Aesthetic Dress Reform movement in Europe – had been ridiculed as cranks. Yet as they correctly claimed, the freedom to wear comfortable clothes was almost as crucial a right as universal suffrage. No woman could claim effective equality with a man while her organs were being slowly crushed by whalebone corsets, and her movements impeded by bustles and petticoats that added over a stone to her body weight.

But if the flapper seemed to her critics to be passive in her politics and selfish in her desires, to others she was celebrated as a new and necessary phase in feminism. The vote had been a public milestone on the journey towards emancipation, but just as important was the unfettering of women’s private emotions. The American writer Dorothy Dunbar Bromley applauded this generation’s ability to disengage from the traditional feminine virtues of sacrifice and duty. To her, their embrace of an ‘inescapable inner compulsion to be individuals in their own right’
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represented nothing less than a seismic shift in female consciousness.

For birth-control campaigners like Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger, the key battle was for sexual freedom. Change was slow: pre-marital sex was still far from the norm for women in the 1920s, but while only 14 per cent of American women admitted to it in 1900, by 1925 the number had risen to 39 per cent. Contraception for women was drastically enhanced with the invention of the Dutch Cap; divorce was very gradually gaining social acceptance, and much else that had been shadowy in the sexual lives of women was more openly acknowledged. The fashionable chic attached to lesbianism in the 1920s might not have been a true reflection of public opinion, but it saw many more women daring to identify and acknowledge their sexual tastes. One of the most brazen was Mercedes de Acosta, whose tally of lovers was said to include Isadora Duncan, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Tallulah Bankhead. ‘Say what you will about Mercedes,’ commented her friend Alice B. Toklas, ‘she’s had the most important women of the twentieth century.’
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