by Betsy Israel
“In the end, she was a good girl,” Colleen Moore told the New York Times in 1971 about the flapper. “All she did was have a cocktail and smoke a cigarette.” Others pointed out that while she drove and danced and all the rest, she also went to school in greater numbers than any women before her. The flapper, in short, was more than a silly screen icon or someone’s shorthand for “troubling young woman.” She was a real young woman with complex views and expectations, and she left us a useful pile of press clippings to explain them.
Many of these “New Girl Sounds Off” stories established journalistic formats still in use, for example, point-counterpoint or He says/She says; going undercover as a kid; the luncheon interview in which the reporter watches the girl eat as she gives a four-hour account of her life. There were always two recurrent topics. One was men. And there was Mother.
I’ve excavated two variations on the problematic mother.
The first was the educated and slightly bored Lady of the House. To many girls, Mother, other people’s mothers—the idea of mothers, generally—suggested a nation of cultural gatekeepers, fierce defenders of cleanliness and manners and the so-called finer things. The slightly bored lady of the house is often pictured as pearled and buxom, like the club-lady matrons in the Laurel and Hardy shorts. The fat-and-skinny twosome are always moving her piano or painting her parlor and, as they go about it, creating a horrible mess. Gradually, they destroy the matron’s precious aesthetic order, ruining paintings, smashing curios, obliterating the palace. (It was as a wrecking team of big, fat female life that Laurel and Hardy attained their greatest popularity.)
Mother Number Two was a new woman, a onetime progressive reformer, desperate because her own daughter had no political views and had never even heard of the National Women’s Party, the ERA-devoted Congressional Union, the Women’s Trade Union League, nor even the National American Woman Suffrage Association. What views the girl held seemed to concern her right to act as she chose and to denounce her mother. Consider some of the contemporary first-person story titles: “The Harm My Education Did Me,” “Confessions of an Ex-Feminist,” or, more to the point, “The Injurious Strain of My Mother’s Devotion.” As far as one girl was concerned, such impossible new women had “crammed their bookshelves with pamphlets on venereal diseases [and] suspected all… male acquaintances of harbouring a venereal taint.”
As if writing for the girl groups of the early sixties, another annoyed daughter wrote: “I’m out of here, mama, and don’t you try to come my way, too.”
Still, it was sometimes mothers who provided the most insightful information about their daughters. An excellent example is “A Tale of Not So Flaming Youth,” by Mrs. Virginia Kirk, published in McCall’s in 1929 and deemed so compelling it was reprinted in the Literary Digest in May 1930.
Mrs. Kirk was concerned. Her “own daughter was nearly ready for that stage in her education [high school]; and she wanted to know what the girl had to face.” Although she was “ten years out of university” Mrs. Kirk appeared so youthful “that she could pass for seventeen.” And so, posing as a student, she infiltrated the high school scene.
She got it firsthand. The number of girls who smoked was on the rise. Nearly 95 percent of all students did not attend church, although most seemed to have notions of a “secret personal religion.” Moving on to the primary topic, she reported that sexual behavior remained the same as in her day. Boys craved physical contact. So did girls, though they were “afraid of the social and biological consequence, not to mention the religious aspects and reasons.” But, she emphasized, sex had lost some mystery due to “semi-realistic and suggestive” film content. Any mother who ignored the subject or “berated” her daughter was pushing the girl “closer” to an unmarried sexual encounter.
Mothers also needed to know that “treating,” the ancient dating ritual, had become a standardized business transaction. Boys understood that they were to fund goods and activities—a corsage, car, food, movies, plays—and girls were expected to allow an increasing degree of sexual progress as dates and sums accumulated. But of course many girls were reluctant. And of course boys resented this fact and punished the recalcitrant girl by calling her a “gold digger,” a bitch out for only one thing: boys who could produce a paycheck from a part-time job or generous parental grants. Girls denied the charges. But how to explain? Although they were flappers, flirtatious and bold, they still were nervous. And because they were flappers, because they were flirtatious and bold, they had their doubts about men and the romantic scheme in general.
Wrote Mrs. Kirk: “Marriage can no longer be represented to them as an infallibly ideal state, since they only need to look around to see scores of their elders making a failure of it.”
To a reporter, at lunch or over drinks, some young women tried to explain their conflicted feelings, their “inability to live life according to the rules” or their “unwillingness to conform.” Most hoped to explain how “in due course [they would] do something quite grand.”
The interviewer was always intrigued by his subject and at the same time scornful. In my favorite, “An Interview with a Young Lady” (1927), the subject, an “aspiring writer” who has taken “a man’s point of view as her mother never could,” explains herself well, then gaily leaves the interview that’s posed as lunch. Having observed her manner, her “tendencies” (the blotting of lipstick on linen napkins, uncrossed legs, and a hat that never left her head), the interrogator watches her swish out to the street, “confident, with a new kind of walk.” But, like all others of her kind, she was unknowingly “dogged by a slinking gray figure with horrible designs upon the security of her later years.” In fact, the interviewer had throughout the lunch glimpsed the “gray figure,” the phantom spinster right there in the restaurant, “huddled in the corner.” As “the beautiful young lady” passed through the door, the “repulsive gray figure… winked slyly… pointed after her,” and followed.
After several years of such stories, the girls’ “divergence from the normative,” the “contrarian stands” and “elaborate risk-taking,” as it was said, became annoying. Enough was enough.
“These little jabs at our customs and traditions can not continue indefinitely…” wrote one columnist. “Human beings are born to marry, as they are born to die. Nature has overloaded men and women with the instinct that leads to marriage, that the race may be perpetuated; and at the proper age the young man turns to the young woman, as she also turns to him…. Such is the nature of human creatures.”
Doctors began to warn against “foolish flapper fads,” especially a “wearing down” of the internal organs due to late nights and too much alcohol. In 1926 Dr. Charles Pabst, writing in the Literary Digest (below a photo of himself holding a test tube), reported, “The girl of today confronts severe internal derangement and general ill-health.” She also risked ruined skin and lung trouble, due to “roofless cars,” cigarettes, and “funny” diets. (The most popular, said to have worked wonders for several screen stars, consisted of tomatoes, spinach, and orange juice). Most terrifying, said Dr. Pabst, was the undocumented “fact” that the flapper increased her chance of contracting TB by 100 percent. At around the same time, another doctor, writing in the Journal American, discussed the possibility of flapper sanitariums that would be designed in “modish surroundings” to “pacify” the girl so she would not die, running off in the woods, to escape.
In the meantime, with few, if any, actual TB cases linked to flapperism, Dr. Pabst addressed more mundane health issues such as boils, advanced dermatitis, and haircut risks, for instance, “folliculitis,” commonly known as “pimply mange,” a severe rash that resulted from shaving the back of one’s neck. Hair dye, too, seemed problematic. Many thousands of flappers had dyed their hair blond using peroxide and other crude chemicals that left them with scalp burns, lacerations, severe skin peeling, and hair loss.
There was also an inevitable “moral derangement,” a slackening of values in flappers
themselves and in younger women who’d missed the first wave but had nonetheless been sadly influenced. In a series of studies, 1928–1931, designed to measure movies’ influence on young women, several academic researchers determined that 17.5 million kids, mostly girls between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one, regularly attended movies. Their favorite star: Joan Crawford, then a brassy flapper who seemed to spend entire films dressed in lingerie and often, for fun, jumped off of yachts. As one girl told an interviewer: “When I go to see a modern picture, like Our Dancing Daughters, I am thrilled. These modern pictures give me a feeling to imitate their ways. I believe that nothing will happen to the carefree girl like Joan Crawford, but it is the quiet girl who is always getting into trouble.”
Soon after, the New York Times ran a story entitled “How the Flapper Aids Church.” It seemed that this overly energetic female was driving men into the ministry in unprecedented numbers. The president of the Christian Missionary Alliance stated with great conviction, “Better a hungry heathen with a club than a thirsty flapper with a lipstick.”
By 1927, some relief seemed in sight. The first generation of “jazz babies” had grown up and retired from the scene. A surprisingly large number seemed to have transformed themselves into something else entirely: flapper graduates. As alumnae of this movement, they went out into the world with confidence, insouciance, and a wardrobe and vocabulary to match.
Commentators, editorialists, and well-dressed ladies worried that second-stage flapperism might become a way of life. Imagine it: Each year more girls went to college, fooled around yet somehow still graduated, then, well-dressed and outspoken, became career women. As it turned out, more women during this time married and had babies than any peer group in thirty years. But the impression of a dangerous “flaming youth” refused to die a natural death.
There was no choice but to kill her.
At the close of 1928, the New York Times ran a front-page obituary for the Flapper. To replace her, editors endorsed a diaphanous, vaguely European creature called the Siren. She was an imaginary woman of great style and mystery who possessed an “air of knowing much and saying little… a mysterious allure.” These truly feminine qualities, especially the part about saying little, “spelled death” for the flapper, that “fashion-killing” young woman who through sheer “force of violence established the feminine right to equal rights in such formerly masculine fields as smoking and drinking, sweating, petting, and disturbing the peace.”
The siren quickly would be revealed as the brainchild of French couturiers concerned about the straight, unremarkable silhouette of flapper dress styles. And the attempt to delete flappers from the cultural record would ultimately fail—but not because the siren proved so blatantly artificial. Those much-feared “second stage” flappers, the ones said to have transposed young flapper moxie into grown-up careers and single lives, simply refused to give it up. They had moved on in life, but their “true selves,” as one put it, lay hidden behind a “jazz mask.”
Writing in The New York Times Book Review, an “unrepentant flapper” recalled:
dancing brown-skinned in a hula-hula skirt… learning how to smoke and swear and stand up for myself… proud of my nerve… shameless, selfish and honest, but at the same time consider[ing] these attributes virtues…with the sharp points (worn) down… the [flapper’s] smoothly polished surface [will] provide interesting, articulate, unstuffy companionship to men in years to come…. Be thankful that we could be the mothers of the next generation.
Many feared that women who cherished their memories of younger years (even if that meant life three years before), would not, en masse, become the next mothers. They would never wear down peacefully into housewives who bought large appliances. They would not even make proper spinsters.
THE ALL-NEW IMPROVED SPINSTER
So we come to the last of the Jazz Age single icons: the New Spinster, the single icon most likely to be crowned ancestral career woman. She had a surprisingly good job. A nicely decorated place of her own, in which she was often pictured seated in an art moderne chair beside her telephoning table. She was well dressed, she had her own car, and her days were so busy she required a diary, an antique sort of Filofax made of red leather, monogrammed and chrome-bound, with a lipstick case to match. As she perceived it, the mechanics, “the orientation,” of her own life “allowed her to glide along smoothly.” All she had to do was to slip into a casual dress or blouse with skirt, toss on a jacket and a pair of pumps, and rush to her car, without asking anyone’s permission. One reporter described her like this:
Today’s spinster is fashionable to a fault. She… knows how to buy and because she is spending money she has earned, she has both assurance and discretion… And because she had avoided the extra duty and unexpected worry which are so often part of married life [she’s] kept her looks… at 35 or 40 the unmarried woman looks fresher and younger than many a married woman of the same age!
And she was patient in a way only a mature, confident person could be. When barraged with public queries—“How could she bear missing the truly grand things in life? Husbands? Tender babes?”—she calmly explained that nothing had been ruled out and that her life was full. She further ignored all melancholy longings for the spinster of yore, that sad, faded dame missing her teeth. (The same annoyed question—Who would perform the vital free labor spinsters once provided?—had been raised in 1860 and would arise again in the early 1960s.) As she saw it, the advantage was hers. She had not gone soft in the middle (or, some added, the brain) as had her married sisters and friends. And she knew men “in a way no wives would ever” because she worked so closely with them.
Occasionally new spinsters wrote about life and inserted the slightly regretful “I look at my beatific sister with seven beautiful children…” sentence. But the majority of them wrote about their lives the way this thirty-year-old woman did in The New York Times Book Review, 1928: “The average spinster of today is… as a rule self-supporting, independent, very busy and surprisingly contented. If she is missing the best things in life, she does not seem to realize it!”
Of course this newest spinster confronted some of the same problems as had her predecessors. As Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote at the time: “There has occurred a rush of activity such as no one could have predicted even a decade ago… still values have not fundamentally changed.”
In other words, no matter how fashionable she appeared, she could not always peel off the scarifying old spinster markings. For example, many wives maintained a “considerate” refusal to discuss sex in the spinster’s presence, so that she would not “too acutely feel her loss.”
More significant, an unwed woman was still considered on permanent call to her family. Just as immigrant girls had been required to hand over their paychecks, so new spinsters were expected to keep an open-wallet policy. In the early sound film Mannequin, proud factory worker Joan Crawford explodes at her poor potato-peeling mother who has given her b’hoy of a brother (played, appropriately, by Bowery-boy star Leo Gorcey) her own week’s pay. Whipping a tea towel on a chopping block, she shouts: “I coulda bought a pair of stockings with two dollars, and I needed them…. he doesn’t want to find a job, and why should he? When he can get enough quarters and dimes outta my salary to throw around the pool hall. I’m sick of it!”
Among more firmly middle-class families, the situation was even worse. Mothers loved to throw lavish Sunday dinners. “Enormous chunks of meat for all!” read the caption of a cartoon defending the single girl who’d been asked to “bring in a few things.” There’s a horde of people in the background, watching her, waiting for her to leave and get the ham, the roast beef, bread, vegetables, puddings, cakes, and anything else that will be needed. The point seemed to be that because she supported no one but herself, she could contribute lavishly to the family fund. Brothers seemed to have felt this entitlement most acutely. Even if these men had jobs, the jobs never brought in enough cash. They had children, demanding wi
ves, and other personal interests to support. And so, as it was reported again and again, brothers hit up their single sisters for cash, knowing that loyal single sisters would keep it secret. Many sisters came through. Thus, in the story, her moral superiority to the family is revealed not by hard work and generosity but by loyalty and discretion.
Of course some sisters saw it differently, and they wrote about it, one calling the condition “the New Dependency.” For years after, novels and short stories took on the issue. In Josephine Lawrence’s novel But You Are Young (1940), heroine Kelsie Wright, a savvy manicurist, is furious at her vampirish family, who wait each week, in a row, for the communal envelope. Kelsie rushes into a difficult marriage as if she were an immigrant panicked to get a green card.[8]
The new dependency became a subject not only for married-women/single-girl debates (by then as common as ads for talcum powder). Editorialists and college presidents joined in the discussion. Unanimously they sympathized with the sponger and somehow blamed the giving sister. One much-circulated and reprinted pamphlet explained this point of view: “How can this young man ever hope to get back on his feet when he is demoralized into taking such ‘gifts’ from an unwed sister? It saps the moral strength, turns our bright young men soft, unenterprising… ruined for all chances of manhood by the humiliation of taking handouts from a sister.”
And there was worse in store for the new spinster.
SEXOLOGY AND THE SINGLE GIRL
The response, or backlash, came in the form of sexology, a pre-Freudian system designed to scientifically classify types of sexual behaviors. Sexology was often confused with “free love,” the thrilling, somewhat baroque concept popularized in the novels of D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller. In fact, sexology, a conservative response to new women workers, concerned just the opposite. It reworked elements of phrenology (the categorizing of persons according to skull differentiations) and eugenics, the study of superior human breeding, to codify acceptable sexual practices, and then to regulate it.