Flapper in the 1920s was a term applied to a "new breed" of young Western women who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to jazz, and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behavior. Flappers were seen as brash for wearing excessive makeup, drinking, treating sex in a casual manner, smoking, driving automobiles and otherwise flouting social and sexual norms.[1]
Flappers had their origins in the period of Liberalism, social and political turbulence and increased transatlantic cultural exchange that followed the end of the First World War, as well as the export of American jazz culture to Europe.
The slang word flapper, describing a young woman, is sometimes supposed to refer to a young bird flapping its wings while learning to fly. However, it may derive from an earlier use in northern England to mean teenage girl, referring to one whose hair is not yet put up and whose plaited pigtail flapped on her back;[2] or from an older word meaning prostitute.[3] The slang word flap was used for a young prostitute as far back as 1631.[4] By the late 19th century the word flapper was emerging in England as popular slang both for a very young prostitute[5] and in a more general--and less derogatory sense--of any lively mid-teenage girl.[6]
The word appeared in print in the United Kingdom as early as 1903, when novelist Desmond Coke used it in his college story of Oxford life, Sandford of Merton: "There's a stunning flapper".[7] By 1908, newspapers as serious as The Times used it, although with careful explanation: "A 'flapper', we may explain, is a young lady who has not yet been promoted to long frocks and the wearing of her hair 'up'".[8] By November 1910, the word was popular enough for the author A.E.James to begin a series of stories in the London Magazine featuring the misadventures of a pretty fifteen-year-old girl and titled 'Her Majesty the Flapper'.[9] By 1911 a newspaper review indicates the mischievous and flirtatious ‘flapper’ was an established stage-type.[10]
Some have suggested that the flapper concept as a stage of life particular to young women was imported to England from Germany, where it originated "as a sexual reaction against the over-fed, under-exercised monumental woman, and as a compromise between pederasty and normal sex".[11] In Germany flappers were called "backfisch", which meant a young fish not yet big enough to be sold in the market.[12][13] The concept of 'backfisch' was known in England by the late 1880s, though it seems to have been understood to mean a more demure social type[14] compared with the English flapper, who was typically rebellious and defiant of convention.
By 1912, the London theatrical impresario John Tiller, defining the word in an interview he gave to the New York Times, described a 'flapper' as belonging to a slightly older age group, a girl who has "just come out".[15] Although the word was still largely understood as referring to high-spirited teenagers[16] gradually in Britain it was being extended to describe any impetuous immature woman.[17] Usage increased during World War I, perhaps due to the visible emergence of young women into the workforce to supply the place of absent men: a Times article on the problem of finding jobs for women made unemployed by the return of the male workforce is headed "The Flapper's Future".[18] By 1918, the word could also be used teasingly of a "pleasure-loving" older woman: a Dr. Whatley, accused of adultery with the wife of Major Sydney George Everitt of Knowle Hall, Knowle, was asked in court why he had begun a verse to her with the words "There once was a flapper named Mary".[19]
By 1920, the term had taken on the full meaning of the flapper generation style and attitudes. In his lecture that year on Britain's surplus of young women caused by the loss of young men in war, Dr. R. Murray-Leslie criticized "the social butterfly type… the frivolous, scantily-clad, jazzing flapper, irresponsible and undisciplined, to whom a dance, a new hat, or a man with a car, were of more importance than the fate of nations."[20]
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