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 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.
7
Historian Eleanor Flexner notes that it took four pages of small type to list all the male occupations women took over during the war. Without the influence of World War II–style propaganda, women of all ages had trained to build armaments, to repair furnaces, while a very large corps of nurses traveled, often driving ambulances, between battle sites. Many continued their work, putting themselves at enormous risk throughout the flu pandemic of 1918.