Bachelor Girl

Ironically, the Gibson girl also seemed to reassure those who believed that “new woman” was an oxymoron, or should be. Generally speaking, these were confused and troubling times—years of violent strikes and demonstrations, of anarchist bombings. Little more than a decade before, the president, William McKinley, had been assassinated, and the First World War was already under way in Europe. In some drawings the Gibson girl seemed soft and ethereal rather than sharp, and brilliantly new. Sometimes she was just a pretty head that floated high above a soothing landscape, making her less a symbol of modernity and change than an angel.

Ultimately Mr. Gibson grew tired of drawing her, just as his public became slightly bored with her limited exploits. And as it happened, another, far jazzier female icon was already in view.

But first a brief eulogy for the Gibson girl, circa 1916, courtesy of one male columnist in San Francisco: “She is as thrilling as a phone pole.”

COME FLAP WITH ME

In 1920, the year the suffrage amendment became law, the Flapper—not the suffragist or anyone remotely like her—emerged as the supreme incarnation of the early-century single woman.

She burst to life in all forms of popular media as a much more precise and confident variation of the “1914 girl,” the bachelor girl who’d snuck out to the tea dance, her hair tied up in imitation of a bob. Now all hair was short, waved, and often covered by a cloche modeled on a World War I GI helmet; dresses, tubular sheaths set off by long strands of beads, hung from the shoulders. The eyes were kohl-lined and the lipstick so dark it almost looked purple. (Ann Douglas in her remarkable study of New York in the 1920s, Terrible Honesty, reports that one popular lipstick brand was called “Eternal Wound.”) Above the regiment of pointed shoes, the flapper wore sheer hose that she often rolled down several inches along the thigh, suggesting socks and schoolgirls while at the same time alluding to a stripper. According to flapper legend, as created largely by enamored advertisers, corsets had been banished and beneath her boyish yet exotic finery she wore lingerie. My favorite brand name of the era: “Silk and Nothingness.”

The Bowery girls, like the shoppies, had formed a premodern female youth group based on work and class. The new women were an educated contingent of serious and brave politicos, the bohemians a diverse band of self- declared eccentrics. The flappers were singular democrats. Anyone could join. Whether she worked, studied, taught, performed, or played around, all a woman needed “to flap” was a youthful appearance and attitude—a sassy vocabulary, a cool way with men, a bit of daring, humor, and some professional smarts. Lacking these latter qualities, one could easily just dress the part. (A sheath was much simpler, and cheaper, to sew than a shirtwaist.) One talent-agency secretary, interviewed in Look during the 1960s about her flapping years, explained:

I was a shy girl, not a girl who danced on tables at roadhouses, or not even on the dance floor… [but] I liked the clothes, how modern and how comfortable they felt…. You dressed in your flapper’s clothes, you drove around—everybody drove around—you seemed to belong to a club… you seemed more confident. You… were looked at as one of the “popular kids” [and]… you could start to feel that way. Big deal that you had two left feet, couldn’t drive either…. You were the most up-to-date Modern there was. That’s what everyone saw.

It was during the postwar, postvote flapper era that modern life as we’d recognize it began to take shape. In 1920 the country was officially declared an urban rather than an agrarian nation—a cityscape wired for communication via telephones, telegraphs, movies, and radios. Speed had insinuated itself into every area of modern life, and nowhere was this acceleration more heightened and intriguing than in Manhattan. It wasn’t only all the cars, or the young women in the cars (called “rolling hotels”) riding with men they had previously courted at home in sight of parents. Neither was it jazz nor the complex new dances that made the spiel look crude and dated. A slightly manic style was spreading in all sectors of the New York population: Housewives, using “revolutionary home technologies,” finished their work in several hours, then rushed around trying to fill in their afternoons. Shop girls and businessmen alike “wolfed down” lunch while standing at counters. Society parties vied with secretive, strange, but no less ambitious costume balls in Greenwich Village; single girls threw parties; coeds threw parties. Everyone went out, drove somewhere, walked briskly; people started running for sport.

The flapper was the female embodiment of this tempo shift.

She was the first single woman ever to wear a wristwatch. To drive and possibly own a car and to have her own “revolutionary home technologies” in the form of unusual new products. The most important among these were tampons (developed by nurses during the war and later patented by a male doctor), depilatories, and tanning lotions, this last essential ever since Coco Chanel had decreed that to be modern was to have been running around, exercising, in the sun.

If flappers were the embodiment, the “supreme incarnation” of all this newness, that’s because they were the first singles to be viewed as a peer group and as a peer demographic—a distinct subset of the population interesting from a sociological as well as an economic perspective. Like that late-1940s creation, the teenager, flappers were identified as unique consumers to be studied and pampered as if they had the buying power of wives. Or something close to it. In 1900 there were 5,237 female college graduates in the United States; by 1910 there were 8,437; and in 1921, more than ten thousand young women had graduated either from college or graduate school. Combined with all those already out there in the workplace, these young women formed the rearguard forces of a significant social movement: more women living for longer periods of time on their own before marriage. If they weren’t likely to rush out and buy major appliances, they would buy much more expensive merchandise, and more of it, than ever before. Advertisers, primitive marketers, set out to “speak” to them, as if through a national megaphone.

For years, most female ads featured women’s faces or women posed behind counters, most often kitchen counters that cut them off at the waist. And that included the all-modern Gibson girl Ivory Soap ad; she had appeared as a blushing face inside a circle. The Gibson may have advanced the concept of single-girl “branding,” of targeting and specifically addressing an identifiably single woman, but flappers took it further. Flappers appeared whole—walking dogs, stretched out across cars, crouched and set to dive wearing shiny Jantzen bathing suits. The point, lost on very few young women, was that for a time they could seem wholly formed without marriage, or while ostensibly in search of marriage. The point was further made to women no longer considered young at all.

In 1915 Cosmopolitan had pronounced that women of “all, all ages, every one” could and should be “beautiful, fascinating, attractive.” Ten years later a male correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post marveled that beneath “the aegis of flapperdom” women pushing thirty, even thirty-five, were now saved from the taint of spinsterism.

It was that war, cracked open the world!… Now these beneficiaries of war work… [have] evolved into the business-like art-loving fashion-setting spinsters of today… burst free from her thin-necked anxious service- without-pay chrysalis, [she] spreads her purple and gold wings… sail[ing] gracefully into the horizon blue of a new existence.

The term “flapper” actually dates from the First World War, although there are still disagreements about its origins. Critic Edmund Wilson wrote that it was derived from the flapping sound of a baby duck’s wings as it struggled to fly. Others have pointed out that “flapper” is an old term for a young prostitute, while still others have nominated the clacking sound of those long beads as a girl ran out of the house or as she danced. But the preferred theory of origin lies with the “beneficiaries” of wartime jobs.[7] In bad weather, many factory workers put on enormous boots they did not bother to buckle as they left work. Perhaps they were too exhausted. Perhaps they liked the sound of buckles jangling as six girls wandered the street. Six girls across, six pairs of flopping boots, and a lot of giggling: That was the original sound of flapping.

The finalized flapper icon was likewise a product of the war years. By 1918, there were more than three hundred films circulating the country at any given time, many of them featuring well-defined flapper characters. The movie bibles Photoplay and Modern Picture World (b. 1911) referred to the actresses who played them as “America’s Pals,” girls just like the reader, with one enormous