Flapper 1920s

The term flapper in the 1920s, referred to a "new breed" of young women who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to jazz and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered "decent" behavior. more...

The flappers were seen as brash in their time for wearing makeup, drinking hard liquor and smoking.

Origins

Flappers had their origins in the popular contempt for prohibition. With legal saloons and cabarets closed, back alley speakeasies became prolific and popular. This discrepancy between the law abiding religion-based temperance movement and the actual ubiquitous consumption of alcohol led to widespread disdain for authority. Flapper independence may have its origins in the Gibson girls of the 1890s. Although that pre-war look does not resemble the flapper identity, their independence and feminism may have led to the flapper wise-cracking tenacity thirty years later. The term flapper first appears in Britain, based on a perceived similarity to young birds vainly trying to leave the nest. While many in the United States assumed at the time that the term "flapper" derived from a fashion of wearing galoshes unbuckled so that they flapped as the wearer walked, the term was already documented as in use in the United Kingdom as early as 1912. From the 1900s into the 1920s flapper was a term for any impetuous teenaged girl, often including women under 30. Only in the 1920s did the term take on the meaning of the flapper generation style and attitudes, while people continued to use the word to mean immature. A related but alternative usage in the late twenties was a press catch word which referred to adult women voters and how they might vote differently than men their age. While the term flapper had multiple usages, flappers as a social group were well defined from other 1920s fads.

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