About book Flapper: A Madcap Story Of Sex, Style, Celebrity, And The Women Who Made America Modern (2007)
Learn how to do the Charleston in just a few easy steps.This book wasn't especially on my radar except a coworker brought it for me to read because I had previously brought her Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America, and sharing books might just be something we're doing now. She said she had a little difficulty reading this one because it's not in an especially linear fashion, which I understood what she meant while I read it. But it didn't bother me so much. It's hard to be entirely linear about a topic like flappers - it was a frenetic time in society, so writing about it would be hard to pin down as well.Additionally, and this will make me pretty unpopular, there's not a lot of depth to the Jazz Age or flappers in general. Just like any other fashion blip in history, it means more to the people in the moment who are participating than it does for everyone else. It was a time of superficiality, not particularly based on anything terribly important - no politics behind the movement, nothing really solid to grasp onto. It was what it was. And that's okay.Zeitz did a perfectly fine at both delving beneath the surface as much as possible, but really the "era" was a gossip magazine come to life; and that's how Zeitz's book came across as well. It was a gossip mag about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald; it was a gossip mag about Clara Bow, Colleen Moore, and my beloved Louise Brooks; it was a gossip mag about Lois "Lipstick" Long; it was a gossip mag about Coco Chanel.All of these people played a large part in the flapper movement, there is no denying that. Whether Zelda was the "first" flapper or not probably leads to more questions than answers, but Zeitz used her for his purpose. That's socially acceptable, that's what people expect to read. But the individual chapters on each of the participants left me feeling a tad cold - on their own, they're all interesting topics, I love them all (Lulu! Swoon!), but there are biographies out the wazoo on every single one of them. Zeitz was able to put together mini-biographies of individuals, and then throw in the flapper context to tie it all together, but in the end I don't feel like I particularly learned anything new.For what it was, this is fine. It's a fun read, which is what it should be because despite any real depth, the Jazz Age was certainly fun (at least it looked that way to outsiders like myself) while it lasted. It was fun until it wasn't anymore, I think that's what most of the participants in the public eye during that time have said.I share other reviewer's disappointments in how little information there was about anyone not white. Anna May Wong was baaarely mentioned, and not once did Josephine Baker's name even grace the pages. Also women, also celebrities living in America, also important players in the same time period Zeitz discussed. The author briefly commented on the fact that black Americans didn't really have a lot going on during the period. Usually any references to non-whites included in Zeitz's book involved someone else being totally racist and inappropriate - there was a chapter about the Ku Klux Klan and there was a bit about reporter Lipstick writing about how black women can't dance the Charleston and essentially they need to stop trying to be flappers. Um.Not sure if Zeitz was trying to bring to light just how white-washed flapperdom was, or if he was trying to remind his readers just how racist society was in the 1920s in America, but it wound up coming across like he was excluding large demographics in his book; the random statements he did include felt sort of like an afterthought, like "I better mention Anna May Wong or people will be pissed. Hey, guys, look, I did it! Now back to the white girls..."Or maybe I was just reading too much into a not-deep book on a not-deep topic.This almost sounds like I didn't enjoy the book. But I did! Truly. There's nothing particularly new here, but it's a nice addition to anyone's shelf who is fascinated by the 20s.Note: I included this on my "hear-me-roar" shelf with a bit of hesitation. One of my favorite parts of this book was Zeitz's detail of how the feminist movement felt about the flappers. While the flappers were largely women, and people looked at them then (and now) and saw freedom from the confines of the Victorian period before flappers exploded which translates into "free women!", the feminists at the time felt differently. They saw crass, smoking, hypersexualized, misguided women that were actually a danger to their motives. And, as previously stated, the women who were part of the flapper movement were not doing anything for politic reasons, they brought nothing to the table about women's liberation, or equality, or anything else.It's easy for me to look back now, since I wasn't a part of it at the time, and see something more to it than that, so on the shelf it goes. They might not have wanted anything to do with the women's movement of the early 20th-century, but they were there and had more to do with it than they probably expected.So there.
For me Zeitz has managed to strike the right balance between academic history and journalistic style making this a very entertaining read with just the right amount of substance. The main 'characters' - The Fitzgeralds, Lois Long, Clara Bow etc - were brought to life again and act as a focus to tell the story of a new 'modern' generation. I was disappointed however that the story did not play out as I had imagined it to. These were not pioneers of feminism but very confused women. The hedonism and frivolity the fashions, the morals and the extreme behaviours were largely limited to a small section of 'monied' women. These women were financed by men - fathers, husbands and boyfriends (who traded meals and fancy clothes for company and perhaps more). The advertising men, the film makers, the marketing departments, the authors and journalists defined 'the flapper' not the women themselves who got hooked onto an illusion of freedom that turned out to be disappointing. Patriarchal control was still alive and strong - most of these women married in the conventional way or struggled dishearteningly towards sad ends. I can see why the suffragettes found the flapper vapid and detrimental to their cause - true equality was not 'real' for the flapper. The fun had a high price. I was sad while reading this book but it was overall a very engaging way to learn about this part of women's history and how it has developed and fuelled modern consumerism ever since. Interesting characters and interesting times.
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I thought this was a load of fun, and I thought it brought up some interesting points that don't always come up when reading about life in the Twenties (such as the question of miserable wages for women and minorities even as ready-made clothes became available and standards of living improved), but from the perspective of the Twenties aficionado and armchair historian, I would have liked more depth.My two minor complaints were that--and this is mostly a matter of taste--I wanted a little more in-depth information, and I was disappointed that the section describing women's clothing of the preceding century was either carelessly researched or carelessly generalized. The description of the layers was inaccurate and, at best, reflected only that of the closing decades of the century. There was quite a lot of variation in dress between 1800 and 1910 and it was both unfair and misleading to lump the relatively comfortable clothing of the Regency era in with the extremely restrictive clothing of the second half of the century and the early 20th century. Regency women did wear corsets but they were not the waist-crushing monstrosities to which later generations were subjected; many were not even boned and served to smooth out the body beneath the dress rather than torque it into an entirely new shape, not unlike the Spandex foundation garments many women wear today. Regency clothing and undergarments in many respects had more in common with 1920's clothing than with that of any other era in recent history.
—Dixie Diamond
Truth Behind the FictionYou know how everyone more or less considers Tom Wolfe the father of the new journalism and Hunter Thompson the weird uncle of gonzo journalism? Well it seems to me that you might need to go back further and consider F. Scott Fitzgerald. His fiction served as the "new journalism" vanguard for the flapper sensibility and his published interviews, essays, musings and opinion pieces set the framework for how we view that era now and even for how people viewed that cultural event as it was unfolding. But even if you toss Scott and Zelda and Louise Brooks and Coco and Clara together how do you get a coherent view of the whole phenomenon? This book is the answer.In accessible, lucid and energetic prose the author provides a survey course in all things flapper. It is an affectionate and generous treatment, maybe a little light on the scholarly side, but that's made up for by its breadth, insight and popular appeal. Zeitz gives Scott and Zelda their due, as well as Manhattan and Hollywood, but does an admirable job of tracing the influence of the Jazz Age styles, attitudes and values out into the country at large. The switch in emphasis from notable personalities to broader influences and effects and then back really drives home how revolutionary the Jazz Age was and how courageous the flappers were.So, if you like your history with a bit of fizz this book is an admirable and rewarding choice.
—Pop Bop
This book may be a good introduction to the Jazz Age for someone who has never read anything about Zelda Fitzgerald, Coco Chanel, or Clara Bow, but readers already familiar with these figures or the period will find little new information. With the disparate subjects covered--fashion, propaganda/advertising, film, etc., the book would have leant itself to some analysis about flapperdom and its development from a sociological perspective. Unfortunately, the book simply succeeds in piecing together scraps--some that aren't even relevant.The book begins by spending a lot of time on Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, regurgitating the notion that they "invented" the flapper (later the book indicates that advertisers did it), which buys into the marketing of the day rather than challenges it or examining it. It also spends a lot of time on figures who weren't flappers and whose only relevance was that they happened to live contemporaneously. For example, what does Ernest Hemingway have to do with flappers? The book doesn't deign to explain, and yet we are told about his lack of fashion, incredible jealousy, and other winning traits of this literary "hero."Overall, this book is a facile treatment of a significant historical phenomenon in the form of rejection of a prior generation's norms. If the book really wanted to invest in the thesis about "women who made America modern," it would have taken a more critical look at the trends and women of the time and taken less information for granted.
—Kerry
