Short Stuff: Flappers

Josh Clark (0:04)

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.

Chuck Bryant (0:15)

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

Josh Clark (0:33)

What a great mag.

Chuck Bryant (0:34)

Yeah.

Josh Clark (0:36)

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 article or essay, Minken 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 influence them, and they're going to be total trailblazers. And he was right.

Yeah.

Chuck Bryant (1:24)

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.

Josh Clark (2:00)

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 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. Yeah.

Chuck Bryant (2:39)

And this kind of happened around 1920, when the roaring 20s 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 both the 18th and 19th Amendments were both 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.

Josh Clark (3:19)

Yeah, big time. I mean, this wasn't like a transition over 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 led by this leading edge of young, like early 20s, late teens, girls, who just completely changed everything. 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 just did all this stuff that up to that point was just not done, and they just started doing it all of a sudden.

Chuck Bryant (4:06)

Yeah, two other big things that kind of spurred this was the rise of the automobile, and more people had cars, so all of a sudden, not only could young women drive themselves places, and they weren't literally sort of under locking key of their home or their parents' homes, but all of a sudden, boys and young mid could come along and pick them up and take them out on a date. And sometimes things would happen in cars, and 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.