Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [66]
But first a brief eulogy for the Gibson girl, circa 1916, courtesy of one male columnist in San Francisco: “She is as thrilling as a phone pole.”
COME FLAP WITH ME
In 1920, the year the suffrage amendment became law, the Flapper—not the suffragist or anyone remotely like her—emerged as the supreme incarnation of the early-century single woman.
She burst to life in all forms of popular media as a much more precise and confident variation of the “1914 girl,” the bachelor girl who’d snuck out to the tea dance, her hair tied up in imitation of a bob. Now all hair was short, waved, and often covered by a cloche modeled on a World War I GI helmet; dresses, tubular sheaths set off by long strands of beads, hung from the shoulders. The eyes were kohl-lined and the lipstick so dark it almost looked purple. (Ann Douglas in her remarkable study of New York in the 1920s, Terrible Honesty, reports that one popular lipstick brand was called “Eternal Wound.”) Above the regiment of pointed shoes, the flapper wore sheer hose that she often rolled down several inches along the thigh, suggesting socks and schoolgirls while at the same time alluding to a stripper. According to flapper legend, as created largely by enamored advertisers, corsets had been banished and beneath her boyish yet exotic finery she wore lingerie. My favorite brand name of the era: “Silk and Nothingness.”
The Bowery girls, like the shoppies, had formed a premodern female youth group based on work and class. The new women were an educated contingent of serious and brave politicos, the bohemians a diverse band of self-declared eccentrics. The flappers were singular democrats. Anyone could join. Whether she worked, studied, taught, performed, or played around, all a woman needed “to flap” was a youthful appearance and attitude—a sassy vocabulary, a cool way with men, a bit of daring, humor, and some professional smarts. Lacking these latter qualities, one could easily just dress the part. (A sheath was much simpler, and cheaper, to sew than a shirtwaist.) One talent-agency secretary, interviewed in Look during the 1960s about her flapping years, explained:
I was a shy girl, not a girl who danced on tables at roadhouses, or not even on the dance floor…[but] I liked the clothes, how modern and how comfortable they felt…. You dressed in your flapper’s clothes, you drove around—everybody drove around—you seemed to belong to a club…you seemed more confident. You…were looked at as one of the “popular kids” [and]…you could start to feel that way. Big deal that you had two left feet, couldn’t drive either…. You were the most up-to-date Modern there was. That’s what everyone saw.
It was during the postwar, postvote flapper era that modern life as we’d recognize it began to take shape. In 1920 the country was officially declared an urban rather than an agrarian nation—a cityscape wired for communication via telephones, telegraphs, movies, and radios. Speed had insinuated itself into every area of modern life, and nowhere was this acceleration more heightened and intriguing than in Manhattan. It wasn’t only all the cars, or the young women in the cars (called “rolling hotels”) riding with men they had previously courted at home in sight of parents. Neither was it jazz nor the complex new dances that made the spiel look crude and dated. A slightly manic style was spreading in all sectors of the New York population: Housewives, using “revolutionary home technologies,” finished their work in several hours, then rushed around trying to fill in their afternoons. Shop girls and businessmen alike “wolfed down” lunch while standing at counters. Society parties vied with secretive, strange, but no less ambitious costume balls in Greenwich Village; single girls threw parties; coeds threw parties. Everyone went out, drove somewhere, walked briskly; people started running for sport.
The flapper was the female embodiment of this tempo shift.
She was the first single woman ever to wear a wristwatch. To drive and possibly own a car and to have her own “revolutionary