For Book Club

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Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, by Joshua Zeitz (2006)

I really enjoyed this history of women in the 1910s and 1920s. It was interesting to read how the introduction of various technologies (the bicycle, the phone, electric lighting) influenced social mores, doing away with the traditional parlor courtship and giving young couples new freedoms to spend time alone. As electric lighting created a city night life for the first time, and women started moving to the cities, having jobs, and living independently, courtship was replaced by dating, which was both a blessing and a curse to women. Now, couples went out on the town for fun, which someone had to pay for. And since men made twice as much as women for the same jobs, and women were often expected to turn over more of their earnings to their parents, young women relied on men to pay for entertainment, creating an uncomfortable indebtedness.

It was interesting to read when various changes occurred in history. For example, until 1900, most clothes were made at home. The dress pattern was created in the 1850s, and ready-to-wear clothes were popularized in the early 1900s, when heavy Victorian clothing gave way to lighter outfits for women.

As America became less agricultural, many families had fewer children. Parents gave more attention to the children they did have, and many young people had leisure time and hobbies for the first time. By the 1910s and 1920s, youth culture had emerged, along with advertising and a new consumerism.

The book was easy to read and informative, but the author sometimes spent more time on some narrow topics (the biographies of three silent film stars) that were only tangential to the central idea of the emergence of modernity. It was interesting to see the different forms that women’s lives could take, though.


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