Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [67]
If flappers were the embodiment, the “supreme incarnation” of all this newness, that’s because they were the first singles to be viewed as a peer group and as a peer demographic—a distinct subset of the population interesting from a sociological as well as an economic perspective. Like that late-1940s creation, the teenager, flappers were identified as unique consumers to be studied and pampered as if they had the buying power of wives. Or something close to it. In 1900 there were 5,237 female college graduates in the United States; by 1910 there were 8,437; and in 1921, more than ten thousand young women had graduated either from college or graduate school. Combined with all those already out there in the workplace, these young women formed the rearguard forces of a significant social movement: more women living for longer periods of time on their own before marriage. If they weren’t likely to rush out and buy major appliances, they would buy much more expensive merchandise, and more of it, than ever before. Advertisers, primitive marketers, set out to “speak” to them, as if through a national megaphone.
For years, most female ads featured women’s faces or women posed behind counters, most often kitchen counters that cut them off at the waist. And that included the all-modern Gibson girl Ivory Soap ad; she had appeared as a blushing face inside a circle. The Gibson may have advanced the concept of single-girl “branding,” of targeting and specifically addressing an identifiably single woman, but flappers took it further. Flappers appeared whole—walking dogs, stretched out across cars, crouched and set to dive wearing shiny Jantzen bathing suits. The point, lost on very few young women, was that for a time they could seem wholly formed without marriage, or while ostensibly in search of marriage. The point was further made to women no longer considered young at all.
In 1915 Cosmopolitan had pronounced that women of “all, all ages, every one” could and should be “beautiful, fascinating, attractive.” Ten years later a male correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post marveled that beneath “the aegis of flapperdom” women pushing thirty, even thirty-five, were now saved from the taint of spinsterism.
It was that war, cracked open the world!…Now these beneficiaries of war work…[have] evolved into the business-like art-loving fashion-setting spinsters of today…burst free from her thin-necked anxious service-without-pay chrysalis, [she] spreads her purple and gold wings…sail[ing] gracefully into the horizon blue of a new existence.
The term “flapper” actually dates from the First World War, although there are still disagreements about its origins. Critic Edmund Wilson wrote that it was derived from the flapping sound of a baby duck’s wings as it struggled to fly. Others have pointed out that “flapper” is an old term for a young prostitute, while still others have nominated the clacking sound of those long beads as a girl ran out of the house or as she danced. But the preferred theory of origin lies with the “beneficiaries” of wartime jobs.* In bad weather, many factory workers put on enormous boots they did not bother to buckle as they left work. Perhaps they were too exhausted. Perhaps they liked the sound of buckles jangling as six girls wandered the street. Six girls across, six pairs of flopping boots, and a lot of giggling: That was the original sound of flapping.
The finalized flapper icon was likewise a product of the war years. By 1918, there were more than three hundred films circulating the country at any given time, many of them featuring well-defined flapper characters. The movie bibles Photoplay and Modern Picture World (b. 1911) referred to the actresses who played them as “America