The American culture in transition: Flappers and Gibson Girls of 1920s

Book Reviewed: Posing a threat; falppers, chorus girls, and other brazen performers, by Angela Latham.

This book is partly historical in nature that discusses as how the women in 1920s redefined sexuality and feminist movement. The expression of sexuality and nakedness as flapper girls on Broadway and Hollywood movies of 1920s paved the way for women’s revolution; for expressing themselves as women using emerging fashion of that time. The “flapper look” was as much a pose as it was a particular style of clothing that women wore. It was a frank and free expression and the allure of beauty at its core. The ladies started looking for autonomy for their financial, moral or physical well-being; it was a sisterhood of mothers, daughters, sisters and wives who needed to look out for each other and protect their interests. Specific arguments against fashionable displays by women in 1920s by clergy, politicians, and self-proclaimed community leaders seemed, more often, as red herrings. Women struggled against enormous odds to define a nebulous entity in terms of their own identities. They received multiple and conflicting messages about who they should be. Everyone wanted to control women’s clothing. The controversies that raged about women’s fashions throughout 1920s do indeed mark this era as important one in which to assess the interplay between conflicting social and ideological agendas inscribed on the bodies of women. The performance of fashion raised troubling questions. Case in point; the one-piece bathing suit popularized by Annette Kellerman, professional swimmer and vaudeville star was legally banned in many countries, and she was arrested for indecent exposure at Boston Revere Beach in 1908. For the “guardians of moral values” the less restrictive clothes went hand-in-hand with diminishing morals of women. Some sociologists suggested that sexual mores were changing.

In one chapter the author discuss the power of performance about brazen feminity by examining the play, “Ladies Night in a Turkish Bath,” originally written by Charlton Andrews and later reworked by Avery Hopwood. The story is about a gentleman who undergoes a homeopathic treatment to cure his bashfulness lands in a Turkish bath on ladies' night. It was censored in Chicago for its unbashful display of women. The play violated unwritten and yet powerful codes of personal intimacy by the close proximity of using nudity. The bedroom farce of this play had moved one step closer to raw humanity and the fact the whole play was set in a bath was threatening to many folks. The author’s careful examination of this play and how it was received by general public makes a very interesting read.

The author concludes that American 1920’s represented a high-water mark in female autonomy using fashion and body display and changed the attitudes towards morality. Women presented their fashion and body as a site and not a symbol; feminity is sacred. This focus complicated our perception of what it meant to be a woman in 1920s; even now after almost 100 years, the attitude towards fairer sex has not significantly changed.