In honor of women’s history month, we bring you a reading selection that highlights the upheaval American society experienced in the 1920s as regards gender roles. The media popularized the term “flapper” to describe rebellious young women who rejected conventional notions of proper female behavior, and it became a common descriptor for young women who shortened their skirts, bobbed their hair, danced to jazz music, smoked cigarettes, drank alcohol illegally, embraced their sexuality, or disobeyed their elders. As journalist William O. Saunders illustrates, flappers didn’t just challenge gender norms, but also the dynamics of white middle-class family life.
I am the father of two flappers: trim-legged, scantily dressed, bobbed-haired, hipless, corsetless, amazing young female things, full of pep, full of joy, full of jazz. They have been the despair of me for two or three summers; but if they don’t fly off and marry and quit me before I’m a century old, I’m going to know those girls.
I used to think I knew my girls. A lot of foolish parents make that same mistake; but it remained for Elizabeth, the elder of the two amazing young persons, to open my eyes and show me up in my ignorance.
For instance, I thought my girls were different from the average run of wild young things. My own childhood was spent in a righteous, church-going, psalm-singing little country town, where young folk were taught “to be seen and not heard,” and where a game of croquet on Sunday afternoons was an abomination in the sight of the Lord.
I assume that I am just an average adult and parent. I was fetched up by a modest mother who wore three petticoats and a floor-sweeping skirt, and by a father who kept on his trousers to bathe his torso, and put on his shirt before bathing the rest of him. I never learned from either parent whether I was male or female, or that there was such a division in the human species.
I came up with some old-fashioned ideas about women and woman’s place in the world. There was nothing frank about the age in which I was brought up. It was not even decent to concede that women were bipeds. . . . Read more
Want more women’s history materials? Check out these materials from our digital atlas entry on World War I and the 1920s!
