Bachelor Girl

exception. The pals all had “It.” As defined by scenarist and director Elinor Glyn, It—the quintessential flapper trait—was a form of perceptual physics. In the heat of a media frenzy, the celebration of something “new,” all of a culture’s most desirable traits attached themselves to one young icon everyone else then imitated. But It, the sum total of many tiny acts of adorability, was hard to mimic. It just came to you: a shoe positioned at a clever angle. Well-timed winking. Clever tap-dancing moves away from lecherous men. A fashion columnist summarized in Vogue, “One has IT or one does not.”

But most every silent screen star, and many of the women who watched and read about them tried hard to evolve their own unique sense of It.

Gloria Swanson and Joan Crawford began their careers playing richgirl flappers, roadhouse dollies, and office workers who expressed their sense of It by suggestively blowing cigarette smoke into the faces of their leading men. Colleen Moore and Louise Brooks introduced the slick black helmet haircut and a speedy double-talking sense of It that was deceptively fun and eccentric. If asked to be fully candid, their characters might have confessed: “I am so cute and charming, you will inevitably fail to understand that I am also crazy, irresponsible, and destructive!” Even D. W. Griffith, master of the epochal silent film, took on a flapper who, in attaining It, seemed to have injected amphetamines. Carole Dempster, a wild-eyed, frizzy-haired actress, swam marathons, rode bikes or horses, played tennis, tossed hatchets, and, whenever possible, did the jitterbug, which had been called “a dance of anxiety and bitterness.” All within the course of one movie.

But the star with the essence of It was Clara Bow, a redhead with a strategically placed beauty mark and a Brooklyn squawk that would ruin her career in the sound era. She played all variety of flapperish working girls—a manicurist in Red Hair (1928), a swimming instructor in Kid Boots (1926), and, among many others, a lingerie shop girl in It (1927), a film that grossed an astonishing one million dollars. The Bow characters were distinguished by their effervescent refusal to accept class distinctions. In many of her films, her characters “land” a better kind of guy by easing in and out of social milieus (the Ritz and Coney Island all in a weekend!) relying only on their high-spirited personalities to erase any awkwardness.

But having It, running around, trying hard to seem fresh and daring, could be interpreted in other ways. To many Americans, the flapper, as depicted on-screen and in the three thousand magazines published monthly circa 1923, was little more than a potential slut.

Sex and danger were big selling points in flapper films, as reflected in their titles: Strictly Unconventional, Speed Crazed, Wickedness Preferred, In Search of Sinners, Dangerous Business. And the flappers, the It girls, were portrayed, at best, as lightly naughty. For example, they shoplifted. They stole boyfriends. Drank. Or, in many cases, they were chorus girls, a job title that encompassed all the above tendencies. The American Film Institute has cataloged 101 flapper films that featured “chorines,” among them, Sally of the Scandals and An Affair of the Follies. The naughty fictional flapper was also sometimes a schoolgirl. In two-reelers typically entitled Honey and Sweetie, student flappers lounged around their rooms smoking and—this was often depicted as an activity—“wearing lingerie.” After a while the coeds put on clothes and attended their classes. For the rest of the film they flirted with handsome professors, who seemed frightened.

Naturally these films were accused of encouraging the worst aspects of It: sexy, louche behavior that could ruin lives. In fact, they seem most to have encouraged female viewers, potential It girls, to become actors. Many 1920s movie stars, all those friendly “pals,” seemed less talented thespians than they did cute, clever girls. How hard could it be? As early as 1920, the Department of Labor estimated that 14,354 young women listed their occupation as “actress.” And so “actress” entered the flapper pantheon, along with “showgirl” and “lingerie saleslady,” as something tawdry.

The first Miss America pageant, held in 1921, barred both divorcees and actresses from the competition and looked very closely at those girls dressed as flappers. Local censorship boards drew up laundry lists of things actresses, playing flappers, could not do or have done to them. In Port Arthur, Texas, one could not “make goo-goo eyes at the flappers.” In Pennsylvania, “views of women smoking will not be disproved as such, but when actresses are shown in suggestive positions or their smoking is… degrading, such scenes will be disproved.” In Kansas, no kiss could last longer than thirty feet of film, and in Connecticut and several other states directors could not stage activity in a bedroom or a kitchen. How else to keep flappers, actresses—all these swarming sexual girls—in proper check? Their insidious influence was felt everywhere.

The backs of magazines were repositories of tiny ads promoting “French cures,” euphemisms for abortions, as well as paid testimonials to the miraculous “harnessing of vulcanized rubber,” a miracle product like Flubber. It could make a tire! Or a bouncing ball! More to the point, it could and would make a condom. By 1926, this latter item could be purchased in almost any drugstore or gas station in the United States, and it was widely known to be advertised in the Sears catalogue.

But the flapper—student, actress, or career girl—was not in most cases a sexual vixen. She was trying on a part and playing a tease. And she always learned her lesson. One of many films to teach it to her was called Wine of Youth (1924). We start with Grandma and the man who would be Grandpa, on the couch, happily holding hands. The screen fades and it’s the same couch, only on it now we see Mother and her fiance, soon to be Father. Fade to the present, where Mary, the modern daughter and her modern friend Trish announce that they each plan to take what they call a “trial honeymoon.” No sedentary courtship for them. Together, with their fiances, they plan a camping trip. Mary explains the point: “to know… how a man is in everyday life before you give your all.” But as it turns out there are things about the prospective grooms—how they look in the morning, for example—that a girl doesn’t need to know right away. She needs time to adjust. In the end, we see the same couch again. On it the modern couple, Mary and her man, is shown chastely holding hands.

“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