Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [24]
This was true of smoking, too. A woman could be arrested for smoking in public in the early 1900s; in 1929 the restrictions against women smoking in railway dining cars were finally lifted. Promoters of Lucky Strike cigarettes deliberately linked smoking with female emancipation, sending photographers to capture attractive young models lighting up what they called “Torches of Liberty” at New York suffragist parades.
Unrestricted and boyish, twenties fashions were another expression of the new freedoms the Flapper was determined to enjoy. It was estimated that between 1913 and 1928 the amount of fabric used to dress a woman fell from 19 1/4 yards to 7: just a thin frock over a brassiere, a pair of knickers and silk stockings.
Before the war women were arrested for not wearing corsets; in the 1920s, girls refused to wear them, protesting, “the men won’t dance with you if you wear a corset.” Bloomers and thick, itchy black stockings were exchanged for loose silk cami-knickers, or step-ins, and translucent stockings rolled beneath the knee. For a time Zelda wore men’s silk jersey underwear.
Flesh-colored feather-light silk and newly developed artificial fabrics like rayon replaced whalebone, heavy wool and starched cotton. Chests were flat—often bound—waistbands and heels low, skirts soared to the knee, fitted cloche hats imitated the cropped hair they covered. Bangles and long strings of beads clattered wildly on the dance-floor.
The most daring accessory was a tiny gold spoon or box containing cocaine worn dangling from a thin necklace. In Noël Coward’s 1924 play, The Vortex, references are made to the dissolute Nicky’s “small gold box.” Caresse Crosby, part of the fast set in Paris, voiced the prevailing view of different drugs: cocaine “sniffers” were “dirty and unkempt, sly and evasive. It gets into one’s clothes, under one’s nails, down one’s back.” Caresse believed that opium was “not habit forming” and was therefore harmless and that hashish, as tried by her and her husband Harry in North Africa, was “wicked.”
Smoking was promoted as a healthful slimming aid, and advertisements showing female smokers featured in women’s magazines for the first time in 1927. Constance Talmadge, the actress Scott Fitzgerald called the “flapper de luxe,” appeared in Lucky Strike ads urging women to “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet” to keep their figures fashionably slender. The campaign was so successful that sales increased by 300 percent in its first year.
Youthful, androgynous figures were achieved by strict dieting and exercise as well as by drugs and nicotine. Girls struggled to become what one doctor called “pathologically thin,” starving themselves on diets of orange juice, tomatoes and spinach, newly available throughout the country year-round thanks to improvements in refrigeration and food transportation. The waif-like Lillian Gish knew she had to “keep fit for my pictures” and described her regime as “very Spartan.” She swam in the sea every morning, “went once or twice a week to exercise classes, and I watched carefully what I ate and drank.” Zelda Fitzgerald was equally body-conscious, probably at times to the point of anorexia. Alabama Beggs, her fictional self-portrait, “was gladly, savagely proud of . . . [her jutting hip bones], convex as boats in a wood carving. The complete control of her body freed her from all fetid consciousness of it.”
Pregnancy was an unflattering indignity. “I value my body because you think it’s beautiful,” said the heroine of The Beautiful and Damned when she found out she was having a baby. “And this body of mine—of yours—to have it grow ugly and shapeless? It’s simply intolerable.” Birth control—and illegal abortions, which killed 50,000 women a year and left many more barren; Zelda is thought to have had one—helped to keep the Flapper unencumbered.