Short Stuff: Flappers

In the 1920s, a certain set of women wanted to loosen up and have a good time. Today, we get into it with the flappers. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:13Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here doing the Charleston on Dave's behalf. And this is Stuff You Should Know Short Stuff. Let's go now.

• 1:25Speaker 02

  All right. The year is 1915, everybody. And the word flapper is about to be introduced to the world by way of H. L. Minkin, a writer who wrote a, I guess, an essay called The Flapper for the literary magazine, The Smart Set.

• 1:42Josh Clark?

  What a great mag.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45Josh Clark?

  By the way, we should say that Private Eye is not a rag over in the UK. So, sorry, everybody. I'm going to go ahead and assume The Smart Set wasn't either, but in this, in this article or essay, Minkin is using a term that's already been established, flapper. It was, I think, British slang for a young girl, right? He's saying, no, no, no, we need to get more specific. There is a young girl that's emerging. They're not here yet, but I can see them coming out of the fabric of culture and they are not going to follow these standards and traditions and moral codes that are handed down generation after generation. There's this new thing called media that is coming up, and that's what's going to

• 2:29Josh Clark?

  influence them and they're going to be total trailblazers. And he was right.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the flapper would come along and kick what was known as the Gibson Girl to the curb. The Gibson Girl during the 1910s was created and popularized from an illustrator named Charles Dana Gibson. And this was like, if you think of the Edwardian sort of corset wearing, updo hair wearing, choker, you know, like dress that goes, skirt that goes all the way to the, past the ankle and like a choker up to, under the chin. That's the Gibson Girl look. And the flapper came along and said, no, no, no, no, we want to have more fun than that.

• 3:09Josh Clark?

  They did, and they did. And it took the death of tens of millions of people to get them there because World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic were a one-two punch that killed a lot of people around the world. And in doing so, both of those things adjusted gender norms to the extent that all of a sudden, like the world couldn't afford to just keep women off to the side any longer. They, they were needed more than ever, like in the workforce, they needed to be educated. And so it opened all these opportunities for women to just kind of come out from under the thumb of their fathers and then their husbands.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, and this kind of happened around 1920, when the roaring twenties came on the scene. There was a new woman emerging from the cocoon that kind of coincided with like, hey, we'd like to have a right to vote, kind of early feminist causes as well. And the, both the 18th and 19th amendments were both, you know, pretty crucial to the rise of this new kind of style of woman, which was prohibition, which sent people into underground bars, hanging out. And then the right to vote. And both of these things were sort of like a rejection of the Victorian code that came before.

• 4:28Josh Clark?

  Yeah, big time. I mean, this wasn't like a transition over, you know, the course of decades that just one piece followed another. This was like a razor blade, cutting off the old guard and starting anew. And it was these, it was led by this, this leading edge of the, of young, like early twenties, late teens, girls who just completely just changed everything. They, they went against so many norms. They started smoking, they started drinking. Women did not do those things at that time. They started wearing makeup. Women did not wear makeup unless you were a sex worker or an actress. They, they just did all this stuff that up to that point was just not done and they

• 5:13Josh Clark?

  just started doing it all of a sudden.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. Two other big things that kind of spurred this was the rise of the automobile. More and more people had cars. So all of a sudden, not only could young women like drive themselves places and they weren't literally sort of under lock and key of their, of their home or their parents' homes, but all of a sudden, boys and young men could come along and pick them up and take them out on a date. And, you know, sometimes things would happen in cars and like everything was changing. The other big one was the radio. KDKA in Pittsburgh was the first, I guess, commercial broadcast station. And by 1924, there were more than 600 of those. And all of a sudden, there was like music happening and movies happening that featured different styles and young women like, you know, dancing and having fun.

• 6:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah, people driving around in convertibles in New York, booming Jay-Z. It was amazing.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:08Josh Clark?

  I thought that was so stupid.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  No, it was great.

• 6:12Josh Clark?

  Let's take a break and we'll come back and Chuck and I are going to work out whether that was actually stupid or not.

• 6:35Josh Clark?

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• 8:56Josh Clark?

  Also, Chuck, before we get started again, I want to shout out Conger for writing this. This is a Conger joint from How Stuff Works this article was.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  That's right. Go check out Unladylike, the podcast. It's great. And so is Kristin.

• 9:09Josh Clark?

  Exactly. So there was a new woman that emerged from that right to vote. That you can kind of say that those two amendments that came out so, so quickly together, the 18th and 19th. One was for the flappers. That was the prohibition on alcohol because it created speakeasies, like you said. The right to vote, that created this kind of other thread of women called the new woman, who were very interested in being active politically and socially. The flappers were like, yeah, you go have fun with that. We're going to go get wasted and hang out in, in speakeasies in New York and just live our, our funnest lives.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. Or maybe go see a Clara Bowe movie, because in 1922 Clara Bowe debuted in Beyond the Rainbow and kind of defined the flapper look. She had that hair bobbed. She had a little bit of makeup on. She, that the flapper style was really coming in vogue. In real life, you had none other than Zelda Fitzgerald as a late teen when she was with F. Scott Fitzgerald, when he first gained fame. I think, I think before she was writing even. And she was sort of one of the first big it girls and certainly embodied that flapper style.

• 10:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Also, I don't want, I don't know who I said was the first it girl, but I was wrong. It was in some other podcast a while back, but I, whoever it was, was in like the 40s or 50s. But I think Clara Bowe is the actual first it girl.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 10:46Josh Clark?

  And then I guess Zelda Fitzgerald was the first real life it girl. But let's talk about some of those fashions that people like Clara Bowe and Zelda Fitzgerald rocked. A lot of it was being designed by Coco Chanel.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:58Josh Clark?

  Like the, the real deal Coco Chanel was designing in Paris during this time. And the, that whole like Victorian era corset-esque figure shape was just thrown totally out the window. And instead it was boyish bodies with drapey boxy skirts, essentially.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was like that sack dress was like the flapper uniform. The, the fabric literally was lighter. Conger found this is pretty staggering, but the flapper dress had about seven yards of fabric. A Victorian gown had about 20 yards of fabric. So they literally shed, you know, weight in their clothing to just, just be freer. The, the flapper dress basically was about mid calf in length. By the late 1920s, it inched above the knee a little bit, but you know, so they could dance. So they could do the Charleston and the, and the foxtrot.

• 11:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah. They, people think like it immediately went up. That is actually one thing that kind of slowly changed. And it, it was just that way for a couple of years.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:06Josh Clark?

  One of the other things that is like, like you said, the flapper uniform was the cloche hat. I never knew that's what it was called.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:13Josh Clark?

  But it's like a, a almost brimless hat. It's very close to the head, usually has a big bow. And it would show off their hairdo, which was usually quite short. You mentioned that those Gibson girls had like the big updo or else like long flowy hair. Another way to rebel against that was to cut your hair very short and often very straight. And sometimes with pomade, that was, that was the flapper girl's haircut. I think it was called the Eaton crop.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. And they, yeah, might use the pomade to like slick it back like a man might. They would show there, a lot of those flapper dresses had no arms. So they were showing their arms for the first time.

• 12:51Josh Clark?

  Scandalous.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Very scandalous. A lot of times with a lot of like necklaces and bracelets and things like that. And the wool, those like heavy black wool stockings went out of fashion for a more sheer hosiery. And sometimes, oh boy, they would roll down that hosiery a little bit to like a makeshift knee high.

• 13:11Josh Clark?

  Not a good look.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  Oh, I think it is.

• 13:14Josh Clark?

  Do you? You like the roll down knee high look?

• 13:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I was raised Baptist. All that stuff is very titillating.

• 13:20Josh Clark?

  I think my problem is I associate that with Mama for Mama's Family.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that'll do it.

• 13:25Josh Clark?

  Yeah. That'll definitely dampen your, your thoughts. So all of this, this flapper party came and went in less than a decade. I mean Clara Bowe hit the scene in 1922 and she was the one in Beyond the Rainbow that really like kind of set the standard. And by 1929, it was all over because the depression hit. And everybody's like, we don't have time for parties anymore. We got bigger fish to fry now.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that was kind of it. The stock market crash was like literally the very end. It was October 29th, 1929. And it was just one of those events that kind of, kind of signified like the end of an era and definitely the end of the flapper era.

• 14:07Josh Clark?

  Yeah. The fun was over and so was prohibition too, because America really needed to start drinking again. So that there went the speakeasy and all that stuff.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  And I think that means short stuff's over too, though, right?

• 14:19Josh Clark?

  Yeah. It's not just over, Chuck. It's.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Out.

• 14:26Speaker 03

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