Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity & the Women Who Made America Modern

by Joshua Zeitz

  Scott and Zelda’s general notoriety might have satisfied their burning drive for recognition. But Scott’s continued success also hinged on the public’s acknowledgment of his expertise on sex, youth, and the New Woman. To this end, both husband and wife encouraged the notion—probably true, anyway—that Zelda was the inspiration for many of Scott’s female characters, including Rosalind, Amory Blaine’s devastating crush in This Side of Paradise.

  When asked how long it took him to pen that first novel, Scott answered slyly, “To write it, three months.2 To conceive it, three minutes. To collect the data in it, all my life”—a clear indication that the characters in the book, including Rosalind, were ripped straight from the pages of Scott’s diary. More directly, in one of his many newspaper interviews on the subject of flappers, Fitzgerald confessed, “I prefer this sort of girl.3 Indeed, I married the heroine of my stories. I could not be interested in any other sort of woman.”

  Zelda drove home the same point when she told a Kentucky newspaper columnist, “I love Scott’s books and heroines.4 I like the ones that are like me! That’s why I love Rosalind in This Side of Paradise.… I like girls like that. I like their courage, their recklessness and spendthriftness. Rosalind was the original American flapper.”

  It wasn’t long before people began clamoring for Zelda’s wisdom on the topic of the New Woman. In early 1922, when Scott published his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, Zelda wrote a syndicated review of the book for the New-York Tribune.5 Under the title “Friend Husband’s Latest,” she confided that “on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.”

  Zelda wasn’t exaggerating. Scott had lifted portions of her letters and diary for some of his work. She was pointing out what many people already assumed: that she was Scott’s artistic muse and, by extension, the first American flapper. She recommended The Beautiful and Damned to readers, because “if enough people buy it … there is a platinum ring with a complete circlet” that she had her eye on.

  Two years earlier, Fitzgerald had encouraged Max Perkins to incorporate Zelda’s face in the book’s promotional advertisements. “I’m deadly curious to see if Hill’s picture looks like the real ‘Rosalind,’ ” he wrote his editor in January 1920, referring to the sketch artist W. E. Hill contributed to the book’s dust cover.6 Now, Fitzgerald fretted over the artwork for The Beautiful and Damned. “The girl is excellent of course—it looks somewhat like Zelda,” he told Perkins, “but the man, I suspect, is a sort of debauched edition of me.”7 In his scrapbooks, Fitzgerald pasted several photographs of Zelda beside the jacket of his new novel. The resemblance was striking.

  Positioning Zelda as the inspiration for both Rosalind and Gloria, the lead woman in The Beautiful and Damned, was a clever trick.

  Rosalind, the earlier flapper character, is a teenager, “one of those girls who need never make the slightest effort to have men fall in love with them,” as Fitzgerald described her. “She is quite unprincipled; her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez-faire for others.”8 She revels in her sexual freedom, explaining casually that “there used to be two kinds of kisses. First when girls were kissed and deserted; second, when they were engaged. Now there’s a third kind, where the man is deserted.”

  By contrast, Gloria, the central character in The Beautiful and Damned, is a different woman altogether. Already in her mid-twenties, she is “Mrs. Anthony Patch,” one of the “younger marrieds” Scott now claimed as his cultural expertise. Newspapers and magazines went along happily with Scott’s redefinition of the New Woman and agreed that “the flapper has grown up in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s latest book.9” Acknowledging that a twentysomething wife could still be a flapper if she held to the right attitude, the Columbus Dispatch announced that “she is graduated from the bright, trivial, careless atmosphere of flapperdom, and, still wearing all the marks of flapperdom’s charming vulgarity, is borne into an older world made unromantic by the super-sophistication of the people in it.”

  Newspapers accepted the notion that Zelda was the original model for both Gloria and Rosalind and noted casually that “Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald started the flapper movement in this country.”10 At Scott’s urging, Zelda slipped ever more assertively into her role as America’s first flapper. During a brief sojourn in St. Paul, he even wrote a musical review, Midnight Flappers, for the Junior League’s vaudeville night.11 Zelda was cast as one of the show’s stars.

  To promote Scott’s work—and her own reputation—in mid-1922 Zelda penned a whimsical yet insightful article for Metropolitan Magazine on the subject of young American women. Entitled “Eulogy on the Flapper,” her commentary began with a deceptive claim that “the flapper is deceased.”12

  Zelda didn’t mean to suggest that flapperdom was out of fashion. On the contrary: Her article wasn’t really so much a eulogy as it was a declaration of cultural conquest. “Now audacity and earrings and one-piece bathing suits have become fashionable,” she explained, “and the first Flappers are so secure in their positions that their attitude toward themselves is scarcely distinguishable from that of their debutante sisters of ten years ago toward themselves. They have won their case. They are blasé.”

  Even as she celebrated the flapper for emerging triumphant in the 1920s, Zelda also believed that sexual liberation might ultimately exercise a salutary, domesticating effect on the New Woman. Critics blamed the flapper for a laundry list of social problems—divorce, mental illness, moral debauchery—but Zelda suspected that by “fully airing the desire for unadulterated gaiety, for romances that she knows will not last,” a young, liberated woman might ultimately find herself “more inclined to favor the ‘back to the fireside’ movement than if she were repressed until she gives her those rights that only youth has the right to give.…

  “ ‘Out with inhibitions,’ gleefully shouts the Flapper,” Zelda continued, “and elopes with the Arrow-collar boy that she had been thinking, for a week or two, might make a charming breakfast companion. The marriage is annulled by the proverbial irate parent and the Flapper comes home, none the worse for wear, to marry, years later, and live happily ever afterwards.”

  Zelda was effectively articulating an argument that would prove increasingly attractive to young women who asserted a right to personal autonomy and pleasure but weren’t ultimately prepared to forsake more conventional dreams of motherhood and monogamous marriage.

  On one level, Zelda’s public musings on the flapper were designed, as always, to help turn the wheels of the Fitzgerald family publicity machine. But her “eulogy” also reflected Zelda’s struggle to reconcile her role as a flapper spokeswoman with the realities of her marriage. With the birth of her daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald—known as Scottie—on October 26, 1921, Zelda graduated, at least in principle, from reckless youth to responsible adulthood.

  Her article for Metropolitan Magazine was a valiant attempt to enlarge the definition of the flapper—to argue that there was nothing really incompatible about being a New Woman and a mother. By throwing off the shackles of Victorian restraint, Zelda claimed, young women like herself had actually prepared themselves to be better guardians of home and hearth than their mothers before them. Getting married, having children, becoming an adult—none of these steps necessitated an abandonment of the ethic of self-indulgence that was a staple of flapperdom and a central feature of 1920s culture.

  Zelda was a product of this new culture. She belonged to the first generation of Americans who were raised on advertisements and amusements rather than religion and restraint. They rejected many Victorian-era values and redefined the pursuit of pleasure as a noble goal unto itself.

  In nineteenth-century white America, men had largely defined their lives, politics, and identities around
work. This was a world where a large proportion of citizens owned their own farms or shops. In a country flush with empty territory, even the growing population of wage earners could reasonably aspire to the dream of self-ownership.

  When they spoke about the good life, most public authorities in the nineteenth century emphasized asceticism, self-control, and delayed gratification.13 These values made a great deal of sense in a world populated by independent farmers and shop owners who needed to internalize capitalist discipline. There were tangible rewards for self-control—not just in the next world, but in this one.

  By the early twentieth century, the nature of work had changed, and the old, rock-ribbed values of the nineteenth century no longer made sense.14 Most men now worked for wages. Looking to expand their economies of scale, business owners turned to new forms of scientific management to speed up and increase production, and this meant the deskilling of work. In this environment, the typical worker found his or her job ever more monotonous and unfulfilling. It was a new world in which there was simply no evident reward for sobriety and asceticism.

  Instead, many Americans began to define themselves not through their jobs, but by turning to other outlets like leisure and consumption. This required the creation of a new ethic, one that legitimated rather than scorned the pursuit of pleasure.

  American businessmen and industrialists were happy to oblige. In the late nineteenth century, they had perfected new means of output and distribution and could now produce an enormous volume of glassware, jewelry, clothing, household items, and durable goods. But in order to sell these items, they needed to persuade a nation raised on the values of thrift and self-denial to complete a 180-degree turn and embrace the principles of pleasure and self-fulfillment.

  In this new era, the apostles of good living were no longer ministers and schoolmasters, but advertising executives and public relations professionals who saturated American newspapers, magazines, movie theaters, and radio stations with a new gospel of indulgence. As an adman coolly explained, “The happiness of the [consumer] should be the real topic of every advertisement.”15

  “Sell them their dreams,” urged an advertising professional.16 “Sell them what they longed for and hoped for and almost despaired of having. Sell them hats by splashing sunlight across them. Sell them dreams—dreams of country clubs and proms and visions of what might happen if only. After all, people don’t buy things to have them.… They buy hope—hope of what your merchandise might do for them.”

  Thus, Americans of Zelda Fitzgerald’s generation were raised on a steady diet of bright and glitzy department store windows, advertisements and amusements, consumer products, and magazine articles—all urging them to let go, enjoy life, and seek out personal happiness.

  “You find a Road of Happiness the day you drive a Buick,” promised a typical 1920s advertisement.17 “The same old story of the nose to the grindstone,” another ad scolded.18 “No time for play. No time for anything but work. And no time then to make a success of himself. Always too busy grinding—grinding. A slave to routine work.”

  The message was simple: To be a success in the modern world, it was essential to have fun. To have fun, you had to buy something.

  Zelda Fitzgerald spoke for a generation of Americans who grew up believing that the pursuit of personal happiness was a noble goal. No wonder the motto beneath her high school yearbook picture read:

  Why should all life be work, when we all can borrow.19

  Let’s only think of today, and not worry about tomorrow.

  And if it was good or even therapeutic to buy a new pair of shoes or a Buick in the pursuit of pleasure, couldn’t the same be said of romance and even sex?

  Margaret Sanger, the famous birth control advocate who endured repeated arrests for disseminating information on family planning, made much the same argument when, in the 1920s, she urged women to triumph over “repression” and chase “the greatest possible expression and fulfillment of their desires upon the highest possible plane.”20 This, she explained, was “one of the great functions of contraceptives.”

  Sanger was an erstwhile socialist organizer who had once cavorted with the likes of such radical agitators as Emma Goldman, Mabel Dodge, Alexander Berkman, and “Big Bill” Haywood.21 When the militant International Workers of the World (IWW)—better known as “Wobblies”—struck the textiles mills at Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912, Sanger had helped evacuate the children of striking unionists. A year later, when the Wobblies called workers out of the mills at Paterson, New Jersey, Sanger had walked the picket line and helped plan a benefit pageant at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

  Sanger, a fiery propagandist who was a magnet for media attention, pegged her advocacy of family planning to a combination of feminist and socialist commitments. Borrowing—some would say stealing—from Emma Goldman’s speeches on population control, Sanger called on working-class women to undertake a “birth strike” to deprive voracious capitalists of the surplus labor that kept wages pitifully low and working conditions both dangerous and backbreaking.22

  Whereas classical Marxists had urged the proletariat to be fruitful and multiply—all the better to raise an international army of workers who would overthrow capitalism—Sanger and Goldman begged poor women to embrace “voluntary motherhood.” Only by limiting the size of their families would they stop producing “children who will become slaves to feed, fight and toil for the enemy—Capitalism.”23

  By the 1920s, Sanger had switched tacks. After flirting briefly with the eugenicist movement, she came to stress the personal dimension of family planning. By eliminating the threat of unwanted pregnancy, she explained, birth control would help women to realize their “love demands” and “elevate sex into another sphere, whereby it may subserve and enhance the possibility of individual and human expression.”24 Contraception wasn’t “merely a question of population,” she argued on another occasion. “Primarily it is the instrument of liberation and human development.”25

  Margaret Sanger had found the right argument for the times, and certainly she wasn’t the only Jazz Age apostle of self-realization and fulfillment.

  In the beginning, Zelda told readers, the flapper “flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure; she covered her face with powder and paint because she didn’t need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring.26 She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do.”

  A young woman in Columbus, Ohio, echoed this logic when she claimed, “There is no air of ultra smartness surrounding us when we dance the collegiate, smoke cigarettes, and drink something stronger than a claret lemonade.27 The real enjoyment lies in the thrill we experience in these things.”

  If fun was the watchword of the younger generation, so was choice. Living in a world that was increasingly dominated by glossy magazine ads for makeup, furniture, and clothing, many Americans began applying the idea of the free market in surprising contexts. A news item dated August 1923 brilliantly captured the tensions that marketplace dogma could inspire. “This little town of Somerset [Pennsylvania] has been somersaulted into a style class war,” reported The New York Times, “with the bobbed hair, lip-stick flappers arrayed on one side and their sisters of long tresses and silkless stockings on the other.”28

  When the local high school PTA convened to endorse a new dress code that would bar silk stockings, short skirts, bobbed hair, and sleeveless dresses, the flapper contingent defiantly broke into the meeting and chanted:

  I can show my shoulders,

  I can show my knees,

  I’m a free-born American,

  And can show what I please.

  These young, self-styled flappers weren’t trying just to have fun, though fun was surely part of their agenda. They were asserting their right to make personal choices. Some forty years before prominent second-wave feminists declared that the “personal is political,” many ordinary women
in the 1920s had come to precisely the same conclusion.

  “Personal liberty is a Democratic ideal,” argued a 1920s marriage manual.29 “It is a woman’s right to have children or not, just as she chooses.” Americans had gone to war to make the world “safe for Democracy.” Now, many seemed to believe that the essence of democracy wasn’t just self-governance, but free choice in every realm of life.

  Such was the idea behind the Chicago Tribune’s remark that “today’s woman gets what she wants.30 The vote. Slim sheaths of silk to replace voluminous petticoats. Glassware in sapphire blue or glowing amber. The right to a career. Soap to match her bathroom’s color scheme.”

  Here was where the modern culture could prove threatening to the Victorians. The ethos of the consumer market glorified not only self-indulgence and satisfaction, but also personal liberty and choice. It invited relativism in all matters ranging from color schemes and bath soap to religion, politics, sex, and morality. This is precisely what concerned the dean of women at Ohio State University when she complained that the younger generation exalted “personal liberties and individual rights to the point that they are beginning to spell lack of self-control and total irresponsibility in the matters of moral obligation to society.”31

  Hers was not a lone voice in the wilderness. As a revolution in morals and manners swept across America in the early 1920s, the forces of reaction gathered in a last-ditch attempt to turn back the clock.

  7

  STRAIGHTEN OUT PEOPLE

  NOT BY CHANCE, the enemy of the flapper was often the enemy of change. No group brought this fact into sharper relief than the Ku Klux Klan, which enjoyed a brief but alarming resurgence in the 1920s.

  Founded in 1866 by former Confederate officers, the original Ku Klux Klan bathed the southern countryside in blood throughout 1869 and 1870 in a half-successful attempt to roll back the gains African Americans had achieved during the early years of Reconstruction.1 Under the determined leadership of President Ulysses S. Grant, however, the federal government cracked down hard and drove the Klan out of business. By 1871, it was a relic of history.