Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [69]
The first Miss America pageant, held in 1921, barred both divorcées and actresses from the competition and looked very closely at those girls dressed as flappers. Local censorship boards drew up laundry lists of things actresses, playing flappers, could not do or have done to them. In Port Arthur, Texas, one could not “make goo-goo eyes at the flappers.” In Pennsylvania, “views of women smoking will not be disproved as such, but when actresses are shown in suggestive positions or their smoking is…degrading, such scenes will be disproved.” In Kansas, no kiss could last longer than thirty feet of film, and in Connecticut and several other states directors could not stage activity in a bedroom or a kitchen. How else to keep flappers, actresses—all these swarming sexual girls—in proper check? Their insidious influence was felt everywhere.
The backs of magazines were repositories of tiny ads promoting “French cures,” euphemisms for abortions, as well as paid testimonials to the miraculous “harnessing of vulcanized rubber,” a miracle product like Flubber. It could make a tire! Or a bouncing ball! More to the point, it could and would make a condom. By 1926, this latter item could be purchased in almost any drugstore or gas station in the United States, and it was widely known to be advertised in the Sears catalogue.
But the flapper—student, actress, or career girl—was not in most cases a sexual vixen. She was trying on a part and playing a tease. And she always learned her lesson. One of many films to teach it to her was called Wine of Youth (1924). We start with Grandma and the man who would be Grandpa, on the couch, happily holding hands. The screen fades and it’s the same couch, only on it now we see Mother and her fiancé, soon to be Father. Fade to the present, where Mary, the modern daughter and her modern friend Trish announce that they each plan to take what they call a “trial honeymoon.” No sedentary courtship for them. Together, with their fiancés, they plan a camping trip. Mary explains the point: “to know…how a man is in everyday life before you give your all.” But as it turns out there are things about the prospective grooms—how they look in the morning, for example—that a girl doesn’t need to know right away. She needs time to adjust. In the end, we see the same couch again. On it the modern couple, Mary and her man, is shown chastely holding hands.
“In the end, she was a good girl,” Colleen Moore told the New York Times in 1971 about the flapper. “All she did was have a cocktail and smoke a cigarette.” Others pointed out that while she drove and danced and all the rest, she also went to school in greater numbers than any women before her. The flapper, in short, was more than a silly screen icon or someone’s shorthand for “troubling young woman.” She was a real young woman with complex views and expectations, and she left us a useful pile of press clippings to explain them.
Many of these “New Girl Sounds Off” stories established journalistic formats still in use, for example, point-counterpoint or He says/She says; going undercover as a kid; the luncheon interview in which the reporter watches the girl eat as she gives a four-hour account of her life. There were always two recurrent topics. One was men. And there was Mother.
I’ve excavated two variations on the problematic mother.
The first was the educated and slightly bored Lady of the House. To many girls, Mother, other people’s mothers—the idea of mothers, generally—suggested a nation of cultural gatekeepers, fierce defenders of cleanliness and manners and the so-called finer things. The slightly bored lady of the house is often pictured as pearled and buxom, like the club-lady matrons in the Laurel and Hardy shorts. The fat-and-skinny twosome are always moving her piano or painting her parlor and, as they go about it, creating a horrible mess.