1920s: Them Fads

“(The flapper) symbolized an age anxious to enjoy itself, anxious to forget the past, anxious to ignore the future”
- Jacques Chastenet, "Europe in the Twenties" in Purnell's History of the Twentieth Century

The loosening of restrictions on women was one of the most significant legacies of the 1920s. In both America and certain countries in Europe, women were voting for the first time. Victorianism and the turn of the century Gibson Girl were out, and in her place was a saucy, booze-drinking, cigarette-smoking, knee-length-dress-wearing flapper.

Youthful rebellion was certainly not unknown before the 1920s, but flappers and flaming youth struck at the very foundations of tradition and morality. Black-influenced jazz music as well as dance styles (ie. the Charleston and the Black Bottom) captivated white youth to the dismay of parents, especially fathers flirting with membership in the Ku Klux Klan.

Young women were wearing dresses and shockingly tight bathing suits that showed leg skin from the knee on down--an unprecedented flaunting of flesh. They were caking on makeup, rouge no less, with the aplomb of streetwalkers--and mothers despaired. Women wanted to be "smarty" like the poet and short story writer Dorothy Parker or freewheeling like the dancer Isadora Duncan.

Talking about Freud and sex were signs of hipness. While showing feminine flesh, flappers also sported an androgynous look, cutting their hair like boys (bobbed hair), but adding a feminine touch through shingling. sennet girl Young men, the flaming youth, wore raccoon coats and drove around in old used Model Ts. Having a copy of H.L. Mencken's radical American Mercury magazine handy was also a sign of coolness and rebellion.

The 1920s was the decade in which dating as we know it today was invented. The unchaperoned date was something new, and when flappers and flaming youth got together, the results could be explosive. Parents worried about "petting parties," where eager, youthful hands explored the nether regions of the opposite sex. Car rumble seats were also notorious spots for necking or "petting in the park," and "billing and cooing" (to "bill and coo" was to whisper sweet nothings while "making whoopee").