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

by Joshua Zeitz

  By the time her daughter returned home, “her muscles [had] been, so to speak, murdered.”

  A study of fifty women conducted in 1887 revealed that the corset forcibly contracted their waists by anywhere between two and a half and six inches.4 The pressure it applied to women’s bodies averaged twenty-one pounds but could reach as high as eighty-eight pounds. Tight-lacing was thus akin to crushing oneself slowly from all sides. As a harsh critic of the corset noted, “It is evident, physiologically, that air is the pabulum of life, and that the effects of a tight cord round the neck and of tight-lacing only differ in degree … for the strangulations are both fatal. To wear tight stays is in many cases to wither, to waste and to die.”

  Not only did these devices force women’s bodies to conform to popular standards of beauty. They helped police the “weaker sex.” This was no conspiracy theory drummed up by protofeminists and dress reformers. The loudest defenders of the corset routinely used words like “discipline,” “confinement,” “submission,” and “bondage” and spoke favorably of “training the figure” with a degree of pain “rigidly inflicted and unflinchingly imposed.” A Victorian man admitted that “half the charm in a small waist comes not in spite of, but on account of, its being tight-laced.”

  “The corset is an ever present monitor,” argued yet another man, “indirectly bidding its wearer to exercise self-restraint: it is evidence of a well-disciplined mind and well-regulated feelings.”5

  The corset was only one of many clothing features that reinforced women’s subordination to men. The design of women’s sleeves and silk pads made it impossible for them to raise their arms to shoulder height. Both bell dresses, which were popular in the antebellum period, and barrel-shaped “hobble skirts”—which narrowed at the ankles and came into wide fashion in the early twentieth century—severely restricted women’s ability to walk. Running was simply out of the question.

  “No one but a woman,” wrote one fashion critic, “knows how her dress twists about her knees, doubles her fatigue, and arrests her locomotive powers.”6

  If layers of clothing choked off women’s ability to move and breathe, crinolines kept them in a literal state of captivity. Built out of flexible steel, whalebone, or wood, these contraptions were little more than hooped cages that gave full definition and body to women’s dresses while simultaneously confining their subjects within an intricate enclosure. Sometimes as much as five yards in circumference, crinolines visually and physically reinforced a political order that denied most women the right to hold property, vote, file for divorce, or sit as jurors in criminal and civil courts.

  To add injury to insult, wooden crinolines commonly ignited when women stepped too close to a fireplace or caught their dresses on a loose ember. “Take what precautions we may against fire,” wrote one Victorian woman, “so long as the hoop is worn, life is never safe … all are living under a sentence of death which may occur unexpectedly in the most appalling form.”7

  With women so tightly bound, layered, and caged, it’s little wonder that the typical Victorian wife experienced fainting spells, headaches, exhaustion, and “neurasthenia”—a fictive nervous disease that supposedly befell women who wasted their energy reserves on strenuous endeavors like a college education or sensual experiences like masturbation.

  Of course, there is no such thing as neurasthenia. Women suffered physical and nervous attacks because they were laced with twenty pounds of weight and trapped beneath layers of hot, cumbersome petticoats. But doctors didn’t know that in the 1890s. Viewing the feminine body as a fragile, closed system that contained a fixed amount of energy, the finest minds of the nineteenth century agreed that a woman’s natural condition—dictated by birth and nature—required protection from the harsh realities of the world and a supreme imposition of control—from both within and without.

  Clothing was just one piece of the larger puzzle.

  There were lots of other ways to impose masculine authority over women.

  Take medicine. With pronounced enthusiasm, American medical experts in the mid–nineteenth century embraced the groundbreaking efforts of J. Marion Sims, a country doctor from Alabama who pioneered the field of gynecological surgery.8 Unaware of recent developments in anesthesia, Sims subjected helpless black slaves to four years of brutal, experimental study. One of his subjects endured thirty gynecological “operations,” all in the name of unlocking the mysteries of the female reproductive system.

  Based on his research, Sims passionately believed—and convinced most of the American medical establishment—that the only legitimate function of women’s reproductive organs was to procreate. He frowned upon “too frequent sexual impulse” and maintained that female arousal was an extraneous, even counterproductive, phenomenon. “It is only necessary to get the semen into the proper place at the proper time,” he wrote. “It makes no difference whether the copulative act be performed with great vigour and intense erethism.” In other words, the male orgasm was vital and useful; the female orgasm, not.

  Sims invented surgical instruments like the “uterine guillotine” and taught adoring medical students how to amputate ovaries and clitorises. By the late 1800s, his techniques were commonly used on women whose physical or nervous conditions seemed to derive from an overexcited libido. What these women needed, the theory went, was management, discipline, and control.

  Most women (and many men) didn’t necessarily see or understand the socially and politically proscriptive function of either uterine guillotines or corsets. Some dress reformers even blamed women themselves for internalizing male definitions of beauty and thereby submitting to their own captivity.

  “The corset-curse among women is more insidious than the drink-curse among men,” declared one such critic in 1892.9 “A woman can no more be trusted with a corset than a drunkard with a glass of whiskey.”

  In the 1850s, feminists like Amelia Bloomer and Elizabeth Cady Stanton flamboyantly rejected women’s fashion and donned loose-fitting Turkish trousers and sack skirts that rose to just four or five inches below the knee. Dubbed “bloomers,” these comfortable outfits represented an abrupt break with prevailing styles. Stanton put the matter in sharp relief when she asked, “How can you … ever compete with man for equal place and pay with garments of such frail fabrics and so cumbersomely fashioned, and how can you ever hope to enjoy the same health and vigor as men, so long as the waist is pressed into the smallest compass, pounds of clothing hung on the hips, the limbs cramped with skirts …?”10

  Amelia Bloomer was equally blunt, if somewhat less political, about the question. “We only wore it because we found it comfortable,” she said many years later.11 “[We] had no thought of introducing a fashion.”

  Although its appeal was limited to a small number of political iconoclasts, the bloomer provoked a firestorm of controversy. Journalists reported that “ladies of irreproachable character, walking in the streets of New York, accompanied by their husbands and brothers [were] hissed and hooted,” while prominent moralists complained that “if a gentleman … were to promenade Broadway in a bonnet or petticoat, he would very justly meet with general attention.12 Why should the ladies expect to commit similar departures from custom with greater impunity?”

  Dress reformers—many of them forward-thinking doctors and nurses—answered these criticisms with dire warnings against the dangers of tight-lacing and crinolines. If they didn’t necessarily rush to embrace the bloomer, they repeatedly stressed the importance of less restrictive clothing.

  But it was at the grassroots level that change first occurred. The caged, tight-laced lady—delicate, trim, and buxom all at the same time—was simply an impossible ideal for the millions of women who were forced, or chose, to enter the world of work. A country in which women increasingly worked in factories and lived in cities—where they participated in a revolution in sexuality, morals, and manners—also saw profound changes in feminine attire.

  Beginning in the 1890s, working women turned to
less burdensome, though still conservative, styles of dress, usually featuring long, tailored skirts that fell to the floor, mass-produced blouses (then called “shirtwaists”), and long-sleeved jackets. These outfits offered the advantage of increased mobility.

  Equally vital to the reform of women’s fashion was the popular rise of sports in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.13 All across the United States, ordinary Americans were rushing to embrace a more vigorous life. College football emerged from obscurity in the 1880s to become a major phenomenon by 1899, when the legendary coach Walter Camp selected the first all-American team. Basketball grew up in the 1890s, too, when a YMCA athletics instructor formalized its rules and created a national mania for indoor leagues. Boxing aficionados donned padded gloves and imitated the magic moves of “Gentleman Jim” Corbett. Would-be musclemen rushed to buy the latest edition of Physical Culture, a serial whose banner said it all: WEAKNESS IS A CRIME.

  There was a lot at stake. As working-class Americans fell into the drudgery of assembly-line labor, and as middle-class Americans found themselves filling monotonous office jobs, there arose a popular longing for the vigor and strength of yesteryear. Slaves to the time clock, which made its first appearance in offices and factories sometime around 1890, servants to a new managerial elite who told them what to do and how to do it, increasingly divorced from the natural world—from the farm, from the food chain, from dirt and grime and physical exertion—ordinary Americans longed for an outlet to vent their frustrations with the machine age.

  When future president Theodore Roosevelt—author of The Strenuous Life—warned his countrymen against the “soft spirit of the cloistered life” and implored them to “boldly face the life of strife … for it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness,” he struck a resonant chord.

  Americans in the 1890s bought dime novels like Ralph Connor’s Black Rock and Owen Wister’s The Virginian and forsook romantic verse and poetry for the heavy bass line of marching songs and ragtime. “Ta-ra-ra Boom-der-e,” a new anthem for a new age, made its debut in 1891 and sounded a death knell for the nineteenth-century waltz. Gentility was out. Muscle was in.

  It wasn’t just men who jumped on the bandwagon. Women, too, were inclined to prove their mettle. By 1901, books like The Power and Beauty of Superb Womanhood no longer attracted scorn for claiming that vigorous exercise would “enable a woman to develop in every instance muscular strength almost to an equal degree with man.”

  “Running, jumping, and natation, navigation, ambulation,” began a popular poem, “So she seeks for recreation in a whirl. She’s a highly energetic, undissuadable, magnetic, Peripatetic, athletic kind of girl!14”

  Changing times demanded a change in attire. The same two-wheel craze that challenged American sexual mores—ten million people were riding bicycles by the dawn of the twentieth century—created a quiet revolution in women’s clothing.

  “To men, rich and poor,” wrote a female correspondent for Cosmopolitan, “the bicycle is an unmixed blessing, but to women it is deliverance, revolution, salvation.15 It is … impossible to overestimate the potentialities of this exercise in the curing of … ills of womankind, both physical and mental, or to calculate the far-reaching effects of its influence in matters of dress and dress reform.”

  The rise of women’s colleges and coeducational universities in the decades following the Civil War also helped usher in a new era of athleticism for American women. College coeds were breaking with long-established conventional wisdom that held “a girl could study and learn but she could not do all this and retain uninjured health,” as Dr. Edward Clarke, a Harvard medical school professor, argued in 1873.16

  In order to beat back these charges—to prove to the critics that college women were strong and sturdy specimens—administrators at all-women’s institutions like Smith College introduced mandatory gymnastics classes during the winter months and outdoor sports for the fall and spring semesters. Students played basketball, volleyball, baseball, and tennis. They skied and ice-skated and took long bike rides around the town of Northampton, Massachusetts. In a letter to her parents, one student described a typical bike course of sixteen miles as just a “day’s tramp.”17

  Intramural sporting events like the annual freshman-sophomore class basketball game were the cause of great exhilaration. Ella Emerson reported home that “we got our tickets yesterday for the big basket-ball game next Saturday. They say it is always a terrible time. The girls cannot gather until two o’clock and then there is a dreadful crowd. Girls get knocked down and hurt.”

  A week later, she informed her family that the game provided “the biggest day for excitement.18 I got so excited, I just couldn’t stand still but hopped up and down with the other girls and yelled. What a day!”

  Although women’s athletics at coeducational universities took longer to develop—at Cornell, for instance, they didn’t come into their own until the 1920s—as early as the 1880s most female students were required to take gym class and participate in at least some outdoor sports. Obviously, these women couldn’t don corsets, crinolines, and hobble skirts on the basketball court. At colleges like Smith, administrators set out guidelines for gym outfits that broke with long-standing fashion conventions.

  “This year there are to be no skirts at all,” Josephine Wilkin wrote home to her mother in 1891.19 “ … The trousers are Turkish; pleated into a band, which buttons on the waist. Each leg is 80 inches wide! They are sewed up from the bottom about a foot & then in the center between the legs is a square piece about 8 inches square to give them better shape.”

  The irony probably didn’t escape Josephine’s mother. Her daughter’s gym outfit was a bloomer. The problem was, of course, that for all its importance and innovation, the bloomer was ugly. Perhaps it was all right for gym class. But it carried too much political baggage to enjoy wide use. Someone was going to have to devise a better solution.

  Paris had an answer to the problem.

  The silhouette of the 1920s flapper emphasized grace and slenderness.

  15

  LET GO OF THE WAISTLINE

  OVER THE COURSE of a long and active life, Paul Poiret was accused of many things. Modesty was not one of them.

  “I know that you consider me a King of Fashion,” he told a group of women gathered in New York.1 “It is thus that your newspapers entitle me, and it is thus that I am received everywhere, surrounded with honors, and fêted by vast gatherings. It is a treatment that flatters me, and of which I cannot complain.”

  Tall and robust, equipped with wide hands and a thick torso, Poiret had a piercing gaze, a long, angular nose, prominent cheekbones, and a dark, neatly trimmed beard. Attired as he typically was in a flowing camel cloak, white linen jacket, and white silk gloves, Poiret exuded the supreme confidence and ostentation that one might expect of a fashion king.

  And justly so. He was a leading member of the generation of Parisian couturiers who revolutionized women’s clothing in the early twentieth century. His upbringing couldn’t have been more different from Coco Chanel’s.

  The son of a conservative and well-to-do cloth merchant, Poiret was born in 1879 and raised in the heart of the city—the First Arrondissement, just a stone’s throw from the great courtyards of the Louvre, Les Halles, and the Palais Royal.

  “I am a Parisian of Paris,” he later boasted.2 It was central to his identity.

  Poiret’s earliest memories were of long strolls along the Seine with his mother. Ducking in and out of the winding side streets that laced through the quai de Louvre, he marveled at the clothing shops “whose mingled smell of dust and perfume I loved” and took great “delight” in listening to “the chat and commonplaces of the ladies, while giving the impression that I was busy playing at something quite else.”

  Yes, young Paul was a Beau Brummel in miniature and something of a mama’s boy at that. Years later, he could still summon up
vivid images of the black velvet suit and the gold ring encrusted with turquoise flowers that his mother bought for him when he was a child.

  As a student at a private boarding school, Poiret suffered frequent bouts of homesickness and depression. Unlike most boys, he didn’t dream of battlefield glory or romantic conquest. He dreamed of “stuffs and chiffons.”

  “Women and their toilettes drew me passionately,” he admitted without embarrassment.3 “I went through catalogues and magazines burning for everything appertaining to fashion; I was very much of a dandy, and if I sometimes forgot to wash, I never forgot to change my collar.”

  Poiret glided through school without making much of a mark. When he graduated, his father, a stern and unforgiving character who believed passionately in God and work—and not necessarily in that order—forced him to take a job as shop assistant to an umbrella manufacturer.

  “Listen,” the elder Poiret told Paul’s new boss, “he is a boy who has a well developed amour propre. He might easily become over-proud; we must break him of that, I want him to learn everything from the beginning.”

  So young Paul set to work sweeping floors and delivering umbrellas to customers. “The point of this breaking-in,” he understood, was to “smash my pride.”4

  If that was indeed the objective, his father miscalculated badly. Paul didn’t get humble. He got ambitious. Armed with bundles of silk and muslin, he spent every night holed up in his bedroom, designing innovative women’s wear with the assistance of a sixteen-inch mannequin that his sisters gave him as a gift. It wasn’t long before Poiret was committing his patterns to paper and hawking them to the different fashion houses in Paris. His keen eye for color and knack for experimental shapes and forms caught the attention of the city’s leading couturiers.