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(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995); Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrill Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Con temporary American Culture (New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1929) was cited routinely for decades as the preeminent microcosmic view of American middle-class society; Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Anita Loos, A Girl Like I (New York: Viking, 1966); John Keats, You Might as Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970); Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 7th ed. (New York: MacMillan, 1970); A Flapper’s Dictionary, as Compiled by One of Them (Pittsburgh: Imperial, 1922).

Periodicals:

George Ade, “Today’s Amazing Crop of 18-Year-Old Roues and 19-Year-Old Vamps,” American Magazine (March 1922); “Says Flapper Aids Church,” New York Times (Sept. 2, 1922); “An Interview with a Young Lady,” New Republic (Jan. 1925); “A Doctor’s Warning to Flappers,” Literary Digest (Oct. 1926); Judge William McAdoo, “Young Women and Crime,” Ladies’ Home Journal (Nov. 1927); Zelda Fitzgerald, “Eulogy on the Flapper,” Metropolitan (1929); Ruth Hooper, “Flapping Not Repented Of,” New York Times Book Review (July 16, 1926).

The new spinster:

We know the former flapper “new spinster”—her frustrations, joys, successes, snipey conversations with wives, and wardrobe changes—from articles published in magazines and newspapers. Primary information about her sex life—and she apparently had one—is found in Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-two Hundred Women (1935, a privately funded study, Vassar College) and in Daniel Scott Smith, The Dating of the American Sexual Revolution, part of the collection The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective, Michael Gordon, ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973). Also Ellen Rothman, Hand and Hearts: The History of Courtship in America (New York: Basic Books, 1984); and portions of Beth L. Bailey’s highly enjoyable From Front Porch to Backseat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); there are wonderfully frightening images of the late flapper down and out in two Jean Rhys novels: After Leaving Mr. MacKenzie (New York: Harper & Row, 1931) and Quartet (1928; New York: Vintage, 1974).

Periodicals:

Grace M. Johnson, “The New Old Maids” (Women Beautiful, May 1909); Elizabeth Jordan, “On Being a Spinster,” Saturday Evening Post (Apr. 1926); Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, “Feminist—New Style,” Harper’s (Oct. 1927); Lillian Bell, “Old Maids of the Last Generation and This,” Saturday Evening Post (Dec. 1926); “Feminism and Jane Smith,” Harper’s (June 1927); Lorine Pruette, “Should Men Be Protected?” Nation (Aug. 1927); Lillian Symes, “Still a Man’s Game: Reflections of a Slightly Tired Feminist,” Harper’s (May 1929) and “The New Masculinism,” Harper’s (June 1930); “And Now the Siren Eclipses the Flapper” New York Times Magazine (July 28, 1929); Margaret Culkin Ban ning, “The Plight of the Spinster,” Harper’s (June 1929); Mrs. Virginia Kirk, “A Tale of Not So Flaming Youth,” Literary Digest, no. 105 (Oct. 10, 1930).

CHAPTER 4: THE SUSPICIOUS SINGLE

Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Boston, Twayne, 1982); Joan Hoff-Wilson and Marjorie Lightman, Without Precedent: The Life and Career of Eleanor Roosevelt (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1984); Anne Hirst, Get and Hold Your Man (New York: Kinsey, 1937); Don Congdon, ed., The Thirties: A Time to Remember (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962); Ben L. Reitman, Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of Box-Car Bertha (New York: Sheridan House, 1937); Susan M. Hartmann, The Homefront and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Boston, Twayne, 1982); Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations and the Status of Women During World War II (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981); Sherna Berger Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War and Social Change (Boston: Meridien, 1987) includes oral histories of women in all areas of the war