Short Stuff: Flappers

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1:01Listen to solita on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here doing the Charleston on Dave's behalf. And this is step you know short stuff. Let's go. Now all right, the year is 1915 everybody and the word flapper is about to be introduced to the world by way of H L. Minken, a writer who wrote a I guess an essay called the flapper for the literary magazine, the smart set. What a great man. Yeah. By the way, we should say that private I is not a rag over in the UK. So sorry, everybody. I'm going to go ahead and assume the smart set wasn't either, but in this in this article or essay, Minken is using a term that's already been established flapper.

2:03It was I think British slang for a young girl, right? He's saying no, no, no, we need to get more specific. There is a young girl. It's emerging. They're not here yet, but I can see them coming out of the fabric of culture. And they are not going to follow these standards and traditions and moral codes that are handed down generation after generation. There's this new thing called media that is coming up and that's what's going to influence them. And they're going to be total trailblazers and he was right. Yeah. So the flapper would come along and kick what was known as the Gibson girl to the curb. The Gibson girl during the 1910s was created and popularized from an illustrator named Charles Dana Gibson. And this was like if you think of the Edwardian sort of course it wearing up due hair wearing Choker, you know, like dress that goes skirt that goes all the way to the past the ankle and like a choker up to under the chin.

3:03That's the Gibson girl look and the flapper came along and said, no, no, no, no, we want to have more fun than that. They did and they did and it took the death of tens of millions of people to get them there. Because World War One and the 1918 flu pandemic were a one two punch that killed a lot of people around the world. And in doing so, both of those things adjusted gender norms to the extent that all of a sudden, like the world couldn't afford to just keep women off to the side any longer. They they were needed more than ever like in the workforce they needed to be educated. And so it opened all these opportunities for women to just kind of come out from under the thumb of their fathers and then their husbands. Yeah, and this kind of happened around 1920 when the roaring 20s came on the scene. There was a new woman emerging from the cocoon that kind of coincided with like, hey, we'd like to have a right to vote.

4:03Kind of early feminist causes as well. And the both the 18th and 19th amendments were both, you know, pretty crucial to the rise of this new kind of style of woman, which was prohibition, which sent people into underground bars hanging out. And then the right to vote. And both of these things were sort of like a rejection of the Victorian code that came before. Yeah, big time. I mean, this wasn't like a transition over, you know, the course of decades that just one piece followed another. This was like a razor blade cutting off the old guard and starting a new. And it was these it was led by this this leading edge of the young like early 20s late teens girls, who just completely just changed everything. They they went against so many norms. They started smoking. They started drinking women did not do those things at that time.

5:04They started wearing makeup. Women did not wear makeup unless you were a sex worker or an actress. They just did all this stuff that up to that point was just not done. And they just started doing it all of a sudden. Yeah. Two other big things that kind of spurred this was the rise of the automobile. More and more people had cars. So all of a sudden, not only could young women like drive themselves places and they weren't literally sort of under lock and key of their of their home or their parents homes. But all of a sudden boys and young men could come along and pick them up and take them out on a date. And you know, sometimes things would happen in cars and like everything was changing. The other big one was the radio. KDK and Pittsburgh was the first I guess commercial broadcast station. And by 1924 there were more than 600 of those. And all of a sudden there was like music happening and movies happening that featured different styles and young women like, you know, dancing and having fun. Yeah. People driving around in convertibles in New York, booming J. Z.

6:06It was amazing. Yeah. I thought that was so stupid. No, it was great. A sick break and we'll come back and Chuck and I are going to work out whether that was actually stupid or not. That's why it's good. Why is it. You know, no, it's. Brian. Hey everyone, it's the Jonas Brothers with the Hey Jonas podcast. We've been catching up with some great friends Paul Rod, Michael Blay, Seth Meyers, Nile Horan, Jake Shane and making some new friends while getting into what's really like to have sisters like Alex and Alex and Earl. She likes to control everyone until everyone to go. Okay, well control is a harsh word. I would say that's a harsh word. I am more outspoken. Growing up a lot of the times because she was so quiet, I would speak for like the both of us. Now I'm working on like thinking a mom is really needed and I'm thinking before I speak. And Joey King. You know, if your like mom is yelling at your sibling and even if you're annoyed with your sibling, you just like won't let that slide.

7:12It's like, you only can yell at your sibling. I'm like, you can't do that here. That is not what I want to talk about her like that. I just want to talk about her. Plus we've been taking your calls, listening to your voice mails and giving advice or at least trying to. So if you've got catching up to do now is the perfect time. Listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeartReadyWap Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. By age of revenue or so, at least 70% have a phone. Middle school is a different world than the one we grew up in. I'm Dr. Joy and this is therapy for Black Girl. We spent real time on it in our surviving middle school run, bringing in a child psychologist and a psychiatrist who's raising two Black girls of his own to talk about what's really going on with our kids right now. So it's literally physiological and neurological and psychological chaos, I mean all this ain't job. We got into group chats and gaming, friendship and bullying, and how to tell the difference between healthy monitoring and the kind of surveillance that erodes trust. They're belonging, you could think of belonging as I can be myself and I can still be accepted.

8:15And then they're fitting in. Spitting in says I have to change who I am in order to avoid rejection. Then we turn the conversation toward the fathers, sitting down with therapists, caregames on Black fatherhood and what it means to raise a daughter through this stage. You don't have more shorts so you can't do flips, you have one to dress you up across your legs. That's the range of this run from screen time to identity to the fathers doing the work at home. You have to get off her device. But the reality is there's a lot of life out there that we don't want you as you're adult in the life to miss out on. This has been our surviving middle school run. Brought to you by the people who spend their careers thinking about exactly this. I'm Dr. Joy. Listen to therapy for Black girls on the iHeartReneo app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I also choked before we get started again.

9:17I want to shout out Conger for writing this. This is a Conger joint from House ToughWorks. This article was. That's right. Go check out UnladylikeThePodcast. It's great and so is Kristen. Exactly. So there was a new woman that emerged from that right to vote. You can kind of say that those two amendments that came out so quickly together, the 18th and 19th. One was for the flappers. That was the prohibition on alcohol because it created speakers. Like you said, the rights of vote that created this kind of other thread of women called the new woman who were very interested in being active politically and socially. The flappers were like, yeah, you go have fun with that. We're going to go get wasted and hang out in Speakees. These in New York can just live our funnest lives. Yeah, or maybe go see a Clara Bow movie because in 1922, Clara Bow debuted in Beyond the Rainbow and kind of defined the flapper look.

10:21She had that hair bobbed. She had a little bit of makeup on. The flapper style was really coming in Vogue. In real life, you had none other than Zelda Fitzgerald as a late teen when she was with F. Scott Fitzgerald when he first gained fame. I think before she was writing even, and she was sort of one of the first big it girls and certainly embodied that flapper style. Yeah, also, I don't know who I said was the first it girl, but I was wrong. It was in some other podcast. A lot of that. However, it was in the 40s or 50s. But Clara Bow was the actual first it girl. Okay. And then I guess Zelda Fitzgerald was the first real life it girl. Let's talk about some of those fashions that people at Clara Bow and Zelda Fitzgerald rocked. A lot of it was being designed by Coco Chanel. Yeah. The real deal Coco Chanel was designing in Paris during this time.

11:22That whole Victorian era corset S figure shape was just thrown totally out the window. And instead it was boyish bodies with drapey boxy skirts essentially. Yeah, that was like that sack dress was like the flapper uniform. The fabric literally was lighter. A cougar found this is pretty staggering. But the flapper dress had about seven yards of fabric. A Victorian gown had about 20 yards of fabric. So they literally shed weight and they're clothing to just be freer. The flapper dress basically was about mid calf and length by the late 1920s it inched above the knee a little bit. But so they could dance. So they could do the Charleston and the Fox trot. Yeah, people think they could immediately win up. That is actually one thing that kind of slowly changed. And it was just that way for a couple of years.

12:24One of the other things that is like like you said the flapper uniform was the cloche hat. I never knew that's what it was called. But it's like a almost brimless hat. It's very close to the head usually as a big bow. And it would show off their hairdo which was usually quite short. You mentioned that those Gibson girls had like the big updo or also like long, flowy hair. Another way to rebel against that was to cut your hair very short and often very straight and sometimes with pomade. That was that was the flapper girls haircut. I think it was called the Eaton crop. Yeah. And they might use the pomade to like slick it back like a man might. They would show there a lot of those flapper dresses had no arm. So they were showing their arms for the first time. Scandalous. Very scandalous. A lot of times with a lot of like necklaces and bracelets and things like that. And the wool, those like heavy black wool stockings went out of fashion for a more sheer hosery. And sometimes, oh boy, they would roll down that hosery a little bit to like a make-shift

13:28knee high. Not a good look. Oh, I think it is. Do you like the roll down knee high look? Yeah, I was raised back to this. All that stuff is very titillating. I think my problem is I associate that with mama for mama's family. Yeah, that'll do it. Yeah, that'll definitely dampen your thoughts. So all of this flapper party came and went in less than a decade. I mean, Claire Boe hit the scene in 1922 and she was the one and beyond the rainbow that really kind of set the standard. And by 1929, it was all over because the depression hit and everybody's like, we don't have time for parties anymore. We got bigger fish to fry now. Yeah, and that was kind of it. The stock market crash was like literally the very end. It was October 29, 1929. And it was just one of those events that kind of kind of signified like the end of an era and definitely the end of the flapper era. Yeah, the fun was over. And so was prohibition too because America really needed to start drinking

14:31again so that they went to speak easy and all that stuff. And I think that means short stuff's over too though, right? Yeah, it's not just over, Chuck. It's out. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.