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
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
Soon after, the
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
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
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.
