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Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern Hardcover – March 14, 2006

by Joshua Zeitz (Author)

4.3 352 ratings

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Blithely flinging aside the Victorian manners that kept her disapproving mother corseted, the New Woman of the 1920s puffed cigarettes, snuck gin, hiked her hemlines, danced the Charleston, and necked in roadsters. More important, she earned her own keep, controlled her own destiny, and secured liberties that modern women take for granted. Her newfound freedom heralded a radical change in American culture.

Whisking us from the Alabama country club where Zelda Sayre first caught the eye of F. Scott Fitzgerald to Muncie, Indiana, where would-be flappers begged their mothers for silk stockings, to the Manhattan speakeasies where patrons partied till daybreak, historian Joshua Zeitz brings the era to exhilarating life. This is the story of America’s first sexual revolution, its first merchants of cool, its first celebrities, and its most sparkling advertisement for the right to pursue happiness.

The men and women who made the flapper were a diverse lot.

There was Coco Chanel, the French orphan who redefined the feminine form and silhouette, helping to free women from the torturous corsets and crinolines that had served as tools of social control.

Three thousand miles away, Lois Long, the daughter of a Connecticut clergyman, christened herself “Lipstick” and gave New Yorker readers a thrilling entrée into Manhattan’s extravagant Jazz Age nightlife.

In California, where orange groves gave way to studio lots and fairytale mansions, three of America’s first celebrities—Clara Bow, Colleen Moore, and Louise Brooks, Hollywood’s great flapper triumvirate—fired the imaginations of millions of filmgoers.

Dallas-born fashion artist Gordon Conway and Utah-born cartoonist John Held crafted magazine covers that captured the electricity of the social revolution sweeping the United States.

Bruce Barton and Edward Bernays, pioneers of advertising and public relations, taught big business how to harness the dreams and anxieties of a newly industrial America—and a nation of consumers was born.

Towering above all were Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, whose swift ascent and spectacular fall embodied the glamour and excess of the era that would come to an abrupt end on Black Tuesday, when the stock market collapsed and rendered the age of abundance and frivolity instantly obsolete.

With its heady cocktail of storytelling and big ideas, Flapper is a dazzling look at the women who launched the first truly modern decade.

Print length

352 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Crown
Publication date

March 14, 2006
Dimensions

6.5 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

1400080533
ISBN-13

978-1400080533
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This is an entertaining, well-researched and charmingly illustrated dissection of the 1920s flapper, who flouted conventions and epitomized the naughtiness of the Jazz Age as she "bobbed her hair, smoked cigarettes, drank gin, sported short skirts, and passed her evenings in steamy jazz clubs." Cambridge historian Zeitz identifies F. Scott Fitzgerald as "the premier analyst," and his muse and wife, Zelda, "the prototype" of the American flapper. Others who invented aspects of the flapper mystique were New Yorker writer Lois Long, who gave readers a vicarious peek into the humorous late-night adventures of the New Woman; designer Coco Chanel, whose androgynous fashions redefined feminine sexuality as they blurred the line between men's and women's roles in society; fashion artist Gordon Conway, whose willowy and aloof flappers were seen by millions of American and European magazine readers; and Clara Bow, who breathed life into the flapper on the silver screen. The Klan, Zeitz relates, denounced flappers as evils of the modern age, and advertisers exploited the social anxieties of would-be flappers by appealing to the conformist at the heart of this controversial figure. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* This lively history looks at the Jazz Age through its greatest symbol, the flapper. A far cry from the staid Victorian angel of the house, flappers wore their hair short, dared to show their legs, drank, smoked, and cavorted with young men. Alhough he didn't invent the flapper as many suppose, F. Scott Fitzgerald did bring the modern woman into the public eye in his debut novel, This Side of Paradise. Zeitz explores the lives of the women who have come to personify the flapper ideal: Zelda Sayre, the southern belle who married Fitzgerald and became his muse; Lois Long, the sharp-tongued New Yorker columnist whose nightlife was often the subject of her writing; Coco Chanel, the elegant designer who carefully crafted her own backstory; and the actresses Colleen Moore, Clara Bow, and Louise Brooks, who brought the flapper to the silver screen only to be left in the dust when the following decade ushered in a less sexually confident feminine ideal. Zeitz's energetic writing does his subject justice, bringing to life the wild coed parties; the colorful, glitzy fashion; and the general energy and enthusiasm with which the decade embraced modernity. An essential exploration of the women Zeitz deems "the first thoroughly modern American[s]." Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"Mr. Zeitz truly captures the chaotic spirit of the age." -- Janet Maslin, New York Times

"[E]ngagingly blends solid academic research with a delightful pop culture sensibility. . . . [A] delightful and informative book." -- Chuck Leddy, San Francisco Chronicle

From the Publisher

"From the courtship of Scott and Zelda to the rise and fall of Hollywoods scandalously liberated 'It' girls, Joshua Zeitz illuminates the roaring twenties with all the verve and dazzle of the era he writes about. Coco Chanel, Louise Brooks, Clara Bow, and all the others are here, dashing through the decade with their spangles flying in this smart, delightful ride through one of Americas most storied epochs." --Melanie Rehak, author of Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her

"Flapper is a must for anyone who is a fan of the Jazz Age, silent movies, and This Side of Paradise. Joshua Zeitz has captured the essence of what it meant to watch as hemlines rose and the stock market fell." --Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, author of A Journey into Dorothy Parker's New York

"Spirited, insightful, and utterly readable--with an argument worth noting: the flapper was America's 'New Woman,' rejecting old limits and boundaries, creating a modern culture, but she was also a 'character type' contrived by the advertisers, designers, artists, and writers who became the nation's first 'merchants of cool' in the American Jazz Age." --Beth Bailey, Professor of History, Temple University, author of From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America

"Flapper traces the transformation of American womanhood through one captivating individual story after another. Here is a personalized, enthralling history that is nonetheless formidable in its sweep." --Kevin Baker, author of Dreamland and Striver's Row

About the Author

Joshua Zeitz has taught American history and politics at Cambridge University, Harvard University, and Princeton University. He is the author of several books on American political and social history and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Dissent, and American Heritage. A former congressional campaign aide and gubernatorial policy advisor and speechwriter, Zeitz lives with his wife and daughter in Hoboken and Ocean Grove, NJ.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

1

The Most Popular Girl

For all intents and purposes, and purely by virtue of chance, America’s Jazz Age began in July 1918 on a warm and sultry evening in Montgomery, Alabama. There, at the Montgomery Country Club—“a rambling brown-shingled building,” as one contemporary later remembered it, “discreetly screened from the public eye by an impenetrable hedge of mock oranges”—a strikingly beautiful woman named Zelda Sayre sauntered onto the clubhouse veranda and caught the eye of First Lieutenant Francis Scott Fitzgerald.

At seventeen, Zelda was “sophisticated for her age,” recalled one of her friends, but “she still had the charm of an uninhibited, imaginative child.”

As she stood outside the clubhouse amid the dull murmur of the brass dance music emanating from within, bathed by the Alabama moonlight, her “summer tan gave her skin the color of a rose petal dripped in cream. Her hair had the sheen of spun gold. Wide and dark-lashed, her eyes seemed to change color with her prismatic moods; though in reality they were deep blue, at times they appeared to be green or even a dark Confederate gray.” Just one month out of high school, Zelda was “slender and well-proportioned,” “lithe,” and “extraordinarily graceful.”

Among the younger set, Zelda Sayre was commonly acknowledged as something of a wild child. She particularly delighted in scandalizing her father, Judge Anthony Sayre, a staid Victorian who, in his capacity as an associate justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, was one of Montgomery’s leading citizens.

Given her family’s standing in the community, Zelda’s frequent exploits were sure fodder for gossip. There was the day she climbed to the roof of her house, kicked away the ladder, and compelled the fire company to rescue her from certain injury and disgrace. Or the time she borrowed her friend’s snappy little Stutz Bearcat to drive down to Boodler’s Bend, a local lover’s lane concealed by a thick orchard of pecan trees, and shone a spotlight on those of her schoolmates who were necking in the backseats of parked cars. Or those other occasions when she repeated the same trick, but at the front entrance to Madam Helen St. Clair’s notorious city brothel.

Most disturbing to Judge Sayre was Zelda’s well-earned reputation for violating the time-honored codes of sexual propriety that seemed everywhere under attack by the time the opening shots were fired in World War I. Already a veritable legend among hundreds of well-heeled fraternity brothers as far and wide as the University of Alabama, Auburn University, and Georgia Tech, Zelda was “the most popular girl at every dance,” as a would-be suitor remembered years later.

Part of Zelda’s renown surely was owed to her habit of sneaking out of country club dances—and sometimes her bedroom window—to join Montgomery’s most eligible bachelors for a few hours of necking, petting, and drinking in secluded backseat venues. On more than a few occasions, the inviting aroma of pear trees, the dim glow of a half-moon, and the tentative sound of a boyfriend’s car horn were all the inspiration Zelda needed to walk quietly across her plain whitewashed room, draw open the curtains, and creep down to the tin roof that protected the Sayre family’s front porch.

After that, she was gone into the night.

During her four years at Sidney Lanier High School, Zelda was an average student, but she was well ahead of the learning curve in most other matters. She habitually rouged her cheeks and stenciled her eyes with mascara, giving her friends’ parents great cause for concern.

A regular at the local soda fountain, she alternated between double banana splits (innocuous) and a “dopes” (not so innocuous), a combination of Coca-Cola and aromatic spirits.

When the entire senior class cut school on April 1, it was Zelda who pooled everyone’s money and flirted with the nice agent at the Empire Theatre, who happily granted the students admission at a cut rate. And it was Zelda who triumphantly organized a group photo in front of the ticket box.

When her English teacher assigned a poetry-writing exercise for homework, Zelda immediately volunteered to read her original

composition—scratched out the next morning in homeroom—aloud.

I do love my Charlie so.

It nearly drives me wild.

I’m so glad that he’s my beau

And I’m his baby child!

It was a big hit with her classmates, but not exactly what the teacher was looking for.

For all of Zelda’s purported daring, Sara Mayfield, her loyal childhood friend, averred that she was no better or worse than most young women of her time. “Zelda would have been the last to deny that she danced cheek to cheek and did the Shimmy, the Charleston, and the Black Bottom,” Mayfield admitted. But “if she gave a demonstration of the Hula at a midterm dance at the University of Alabama, had not Alice Roosevelt, the President’s daughter, been similarly criticized for doing the same thing . . . ?”

To be sure, Zelda “rode behind her admirers . . . on their motorcycles with her arms around them, raised her hemlines to the knee, bobbed her hair, smoked, tippled, and kissed the boys goodbye.” But this sort of “flirtation was an old Southern custom; ‘going the limit’ was not. Zelda was a reigning beauty and ‘a knockout’ in the paleolithic slang of the day, far too popular to have ‘put out’ for her beaux, far too shrewd in the tactics and strategy of popularity to grant her favors to one suitor and thereby alienate a regiment of them.”

Maybe so, maybe not. But Zelda did her best to cultivate a scandalous reputation. She encouraged reports of skinny-dipping excursions and multiple romantic entanglements. During the summer, when it got too hot, she slipped out of her underwear and asked her date to hold it for the evening in his coat pocket. And at a legendary Christmas bop, when a chaperone reproached her for dancing too closely and too wantonly with her date, Zelda retaliated by swiping a band of mistletoe and pinning it to her backside.

Long after the last chords of the Jazz Age had been struck, Zelda admitted in her own autobiographical novel that “I never let them down on the dramatic possibilities of a scene—I give a damned good show.”

Scott Fitzgerald certainly thought so.

Just shy of his twenty-first birthday, the young army lieutenant was stationed at nearby Camp Sheridan, where he spent most of his time devouring novels and cavorting with the sons and daughters of Montgomery’s first citizens. Smartly clad in a new dress uniform, Fitzgerald cut an impressive figure. Shortly after the war, when Scott’s first book became a best-seller, an interviewer described him as bearing “the agreeable countenance of a young person who cheerfully regards himself as the center of everything.” His eyes were “blue and domineering,” his nose “Grecian and pleasantly snippy; mouth, ‘spoiled and alluring,’ like one of his own yellow-haired heroines; and he parts his wavy fair hair in the middle, as Amory Blaine”—the fictional hero of Fitzgerald’s first novel—“decided that all ‘slickers’ should do.”

Fitzgerald was a native of St. Paul, Minnesota, who had spent four years at Princeton without earning his undergraduate degree. An indifferent student, he received poor marks from his professors and made little contribution to classroom discussion. To his credit, Fitzgerald was an accomplished amateur playwright and a frequent contributor to the university literary magazine. But on balance, his academic career fell far short of even his expectations.

Lazy in all things but reading and writing, vaguely ambitious but hopelessly lacking direction, Fitzgerald escaped the indignity of a fifth year at Princeton by enlisting in the army in late 1917. First stationed at Fort Leavenworth for officer’s training, he made a poor impression on his platoon captain, a serious young West Point man named Dwight D. Eisenhower. Scott’s attention simply wasn’t on soldiering, and it showed. He fully expected that he would be sent to the European front, and fearing that he might return in a pine box, he accelerated work on his first novel, The Romantic Egotist. It consumed much of his time and all of his energy.

On short leave from the army in early 1918, Scott enjoyed a brief hiatus in Princeton, where he managed to finish the novel and send it off to an editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons. After reporting back for duty in March, he was transferred to the Forty-fifth Infantry Regiment at Camp Alexander in Kentucky. Though he was trained to lead a platoon, his commanding officers found Scott so deficient as a soldier that they consigned him to stateside duty—first at Camp Gordon in Georgia and then, in June 1918, at Camp Sheridan.

With his novel under review and combat service safely at bay, Fitzgerald was free to immerse himself in local revelries. Almost from the start, he began working his way through a list of Montgomery’s most eligible debutantes, generously supplied by Lawton Campbell, a local boy he had known at Princeton. In a more candid moment years later, Fitzgerald admitted that he had been naturally endowed with neither “great animal magnetism nor money,” two certain keys...

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown; First Edition (March 14, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1400080533
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1400080533
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.3 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,836,927 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5,600 in Women in History
- #13,570 in Women's Studies (Books)
- #67,020 in United States History (Books)

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4.3 352 ratings

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Joshua Zeitz

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Joshua Zeitz is a contributing writer at Politico Magazine and has taught American history and politics at Cambridge University, Harvard University, and Princeton University. He is the author of several books on American political and social history, including the New York Times bestseller, Lincoln's Boys. He as written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Dissent, and American Heritage. Josh lives with his wife and two daughters in Hoboken, NJ. Follow him on twitter @joshuamzeitz and his personal webpage joshuamzeitz.com

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Le Grand Chat Rouge

Charming and informative.

Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2024

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Very well done evocation of the 1920s, the liberated women of the time - most of them independently wealthy, of course - and well researched. For those who are fans of the 1920's, this is great reading though the territory is familiar.

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Kelley Ridings

Quick-reading & intriguing history of 1920s flappers

Reviewed in the United States on February 25, 2023

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Flapper is a quick reading, intriguing story about the rise and fall of the flappers of the 1920s — young women who rebelled again the repression and mores of the 1910s and before. With the end of World War 1, young people reveled in jazz, bootleg alcohol, the wild freedom cars presented them, and seriously relaxed beliefs about sexuality. Young women found themselves released from the restrictive clothing of years past. For many flappers and the men who chased them, there were no holds barred on wild parties, drinking, and fast living. This book highlights the carefree lives of flappers throughout the turbulent and free-living era.

Overall, I enjoyed this book and found intriguing insights to the times. I particularly enjoyed his ficus on three actresses of the 20s who personified flappers on screen — Colleen Moore, Louise Brooks, and Clara Bow. I’ve long been interested in this era, but even so, I learned a lot from Zeitz’s book. It’s thoroughly presented and written in an accessible style. The one flaw is that some parts of the book have seemingly drifted from the central topic of flappers. For example, I don’t see how the story of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (a movie that made heroes of the KKK) had anything to do with flappers. It was an interesting story and reflected the values of the times perhaps, but it didn’t connect to flappers as far as I could tell. When the book began, most of it was about author, F. Scott Fitzgerald. So much so that at one point I seriously wondered if this was his biography and had to examine the cover again in case I had missed that hidden explanation. It wasn’t; instead Zeitz just focused a lot of his book about flappers on this man, Fitzgerald, who wrote about flappers and was a personal exemplar of the excesses (drinking, parties, and wild and reckless lifestyle) of the 20s. Still while Zeitz did like to stray a bit from his central topic, it was still all interesting.

This is a good read and worth taking a look at if you have an interest in this era.

Reviewed in the United States on March 28, 2017

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Sex, booze, and jazz. For those of you who are fans of the new “Z: The Beginning of Everything” Amazon show with Christina Ricci, I want to highly recommend Joshua Zeitz’s non-fiction book, “Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern”. Zeitz is an historian and has taught American history and politics at Cambridge, Harvard, and Princeton. He is also the author of several books on American political and social history.

"Flapper" spotlights the history of the Jazz Age while zeroing in on the conception of the ever-alluring flapper subculture. The book includes a look into Coco Channel’s rise to fame through her fashion empire, the Hollywood flapper starlets of the era, and the formation of the infamous Madison Avenue, whose executives helped propel the flappers' glamorous look. One of my favorite parts of the book is the interweaving of F. Scott Fitzgerald ("The Great Gatsby") and Zelda Fitzgerald's lives. They truly were the wild "it" couple of the Jazz Age and Zeitz partially credits the couple with birthing the flapper persona.

I'd expect that many Americans probably would guess that the first counter-culture movement wasn’t until the 1960s. Zeitz however, pinpoints an earlier revolution in the response from Jazz-Age youth who were fed up with imposed Victorian ideals. Flappers bucked that system and were the female rebels of their time. However, the flapper subculture was short-lived and ultimately collapsed under the onset of the Depression.

In conclusion, there are many non-fiction books that can become repetitive and bogged down with vocabulary. Zeitz’s work is fresh and his information and ability to weave a storylined plot through an historical narrative – which I don’t see often – kept me turning the pages. Definitely a great read, and if you haven’t seen "Z: The Beginning of Everything", I highly recommend it. Christina Ricci has literally become Zelda Fitzgerald's reincarnate. Fantastic acting. And, Joshua Zeitz, if you are reading this, when is your next book coming out? Please say it's about the history of Victorian America.

10 people found this helpful

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Dixie Diamond

Good, but maybe take it with half a grain of salt

Reviewed in the United States on August 10, 2007

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I picked up the hardcover of this as a fun, quick, summer read. I wasn't disappointed; it's very much like _Only Yesterday_despite the 75-year difference in publishing dates.

I think that, overall, this is a good book, and I think that it makes many valid and interesting points about what made the 1920's so "revolutionary" and why the decade marked the beginnings of modern American culture.

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.

It does make you want to run out and bob your hair, though!

14 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

nadalie

Fascinating

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 1, 2017

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So much interesting information in this book and written in a really easy-to-pick-up style. If you're at all interested in America in the 1920s this is the book for you. Couldn't put it down. Could only be improved with a few more photos.

noonefamous

An absolutely wonderful book

Reviewed in Canada on April 25, 2014

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If you have any interest in the emergent culture of young women in the 1920s then I would definitely get this book, in fact, I would consider it an essential reference. I have a tremendous interest in the Jazz Age and the role that women played in it and have found Zeitz's book to be one of the best on the subject. It's not just informative, it is actually fun to read, it really makes the age seem to come alive. There are profilles on writers, actresses, columnists, arists, designers and socialites - these profiles help to provide an intimate and individual counterpoint to the broader socio-cultural themes discussed in the book. You get a genuine sense of the personal changes being wrought in a fast-changing world. The writing is lively and upbeat and serves the topic well.

Suzanne Lazinsky

Fascinating material and written in an easy to read style

Reviewed in Canada on August 3, 2015

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Very interesting and informative review of the 1920's covering the "whys" behind the revolutions of societal changes, things that don't usually come to mind when thinking about the era. Fascinating material and written in an easy to read style. I ordered it as a research book and am finding it more thought provoking than I expected, a pleasant surprise.

emreads

Interesting

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 29, 2013

Verified Purchase

I accidentally purchased this instead of the heavily publicised Flapppers and was pleasantly surprised. It's a really interesting read covering many areas of life at the time.

A Reader

Interesting Read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 28, 2013

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I really enjoyed this book and read it in no time at all. It's very well written and I learned a lot about the period.
I'd recommend this book to anybody interested in the Jazz Age.

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