Devil Babylon

Flappers Are Brave and Gay and Beautiful Many young women were not content merely to dance although they soon made the Charleston their trademark jive. They began wearing looser and shorter dresses, using cosmetics, smoking in public (which could have led to an arrest in some states before 1912), driving alone in their automobiles, attending hops, proms, and ball games, and talking openly about sex. And like Bernice in one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's most admired short stories from 1920, they "bobbed" their hair. "Do you think I ought to bob my hair?" Bernice asks Charley Paulson. Charley looks up in surprise. "Why?" "Because I'm considering it. It's such a sure and easy way of attracting attention.... I want to be a society vampire, you see." In Winnipeg, Vivian Maw, a young and single stenographer who worked at the Inland Shipping Company, impulsively bobbed her hair one lunch hour in December 1922. Her return to her office with her new coiffure sent shockwaves through the Winnipeg Grain Exchange Building that lasted for days. Her female friends soon followed her lead. Their short hair a visible challenge to traditional styles and authority underlined that real change was in the air. Such women as Vivian or the fictional Bernice were more independent than their mothers and determined to enjoy life's pleasures. "What a gulf separates even two generations," claimed sociologist William Ogburn in his 1929 book on changing American morality. "Mothers and daughters often understand each other's viewpoints so little that it seems as though they [are not] speaking the same language." The daughters modelled themselves after silent film stars Gloria Swanson, whose "bob" was adroitly "pressed around her head and not carefully curled," and Louise Brooks, a former Ziegfeld Follies dancer, whose "sleek look and signature bob" were made famous in advertisements, photographs, and magazine sketches. Swanson and Brooks were the antithesis of "Gibson Girls." As depicted in LIFE magazine by Charles Dana Gibson in the 1890s, "Gibson Girls" were fullfigured and tightly corseted, secure of their social position, and happy to be their husbands' chief adornment. By the twenties, they were a vanishing breed. The new modern women were flatchested, and in the words of London's Daily Mail "as slim as a lamp post." Writer H.L. Mencken took note of this radical transformation in fashion, look, and attitude as early as 1915. He called these new women "flappers" (although the term was likely used earlier than this to describe women who wore slit-skirts and rode in automobiles). "Observe, then, this nameless one, this American Flapper," he declared. "Her skirts have just reached her very trim and pretty ankles: her hair, newly coiled upon her skull, has just exposed the ravishing whiteness of her neck.... She is opposed to the double standard of morality and favours a law prohibiting it." Or, put slightly differently a few years later by Fitzgerald's funloving and debonair wife, Zelda, a flapper if there ever was one, "I think a woman gets more happiness out of being gay, lighthearted, unconventional, mistress of her own fate, than out of a career that calls for hard work, intellectual pessimism and loneliness," she said. "I don't want Pat [her daughter] to be a genius. I want her to be a flapper, because flappers are brave and gay and beautiful."Levine, Allan is the author of 'Devil Babylon ', published 2005 under ISBN 9780771052736 and ISBN 0771052731.