Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [71]
After several years of such stories, the girls’ “divergence from the normative,” the “contrarian stands” and “elaborate risk-taking,” as it was said, became annoying. Enough was enough.
“These little jabs at our customs and traditions can not continue indefinitely…” wrote one columnist. “Human beings are born to marry, as they are born to die. Nature has overloaded men and women with the instinct that leads to marriage, that the race may be perpetuated; and at the proper age the young man turns to the young woman, as she also turns to him…. Such is the nature of human creatures.”
Doctors began to warn against “foolish flapper fads,” especially a “wearing down” of the internal organs due to late nights and too much alcohol. In 1926 Dr. Charles Pabst, writing in the Literary Digest (below a photo of himself holding a test tube), reported, “The girl of today confronts severe internal derangement and general ill-health.” She also risked ruined skin and lung trouble, due to “roofless cars,” cigarettes, and “funny” diets. (The most popular, said to have worked wonders for several screen stars, consisted of tomatoes, spinach, and orange juice). Most terrifying, said Dr. Pabst, was the undocumented “fact” that the flapper increased her chance of contracting TB by 100 percent. At around the same time, another doctor, writing in the Journal American, discussed the possibility of flapper sanitariums that would be designed in “modish surroundings” to “pacify” the girl so she would not die, running off in the woods, to escape.
In the meantime, with few, if any, actual TB cases linked to flapperism, Dr. Pabst addressed more mundane health issues such as boils, advanced dermatitis, and haircut risks, for instance, “folliculitis,” commonly known as “pimply mange,” a severe rash that resulted from shaving the back of one’s neck. Hair dye, too, seemed problematic. Many thousands of flappers had dyed their hair blond using peroxide and other crude chemicals that left them with scalp burns, lacerations, severe skin peeling, and hair loss.
There was also an inevitable “moral derangement,” a slackening of values in flappers themselves and in younger women who’d missed the first wave but had nonetheless been sadly influenced. In a series of studies, 1928–1931, designed to measure movies’ influence on young women, several academic researchers determined that 17.5 million kids, mostly girls between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one, regularly attended movies. Their favorite star: Joan Crawford, then a brassy flapper who seemed to spend entire films dressed in lingerie and often, for fun, jumped off of yachts. As one girl told an interviewer: “When I go to see a modern picture, like Our Dancing Daughters, I am thrilled. These modern pictures give me a feeling to imitate their ways. I believe that nothing will happen to the carefree girl like Joan Crawford, but it is the quiet girl who is always getting into trouble.”
Soon after, the New York Times ran a story entitled “How the Flapper Aids Church.” It seemed that this overly energetic female was driving men into the ministry in unprecedented numbers. The president of the Christian Missionary Alliance stated with great conviction, “Better a hungry heathen with a club than a thirsty flapper with a lipstick.”
By 1927, some relief seemed in sight. The first generation of “jazz babies” had grown up and