Bitchy History - 2.3 - Flappers and Feminism

00:00:00.020 Welcome to Bitchy History, the irreverent history podcast that is the bee's knees, and if you haven't subscribed already and shared the show with your friends and family, you're a real flat tire.

00:00:23.980 Here we are at episode 3 of season 2. Hopefully you are loving this season as much as I'm loving making it.

00:00:29.400 I know I missed a week. This time, it was not because of my ADHD and poor planning skills.

00:00:34.880 I had to help my parents move their office from one building to another, which was hell, to put it mildly,

00:00:40.780 and a lot more exhausting than I thought it was going to be.

00:00:43.800 And I just did not have the energy to make any episodes last week.

00:00:48.340 Before we get down to the history, there's one brief announcement.

00:00:50.900 I've decided to switch from Patreon to Substack for subscriptions to support the podcast.

00:00:55.600 Substack just has more functionality for what I want to do with this podcast,

00:00:59.680 and I believe it's going to allow me to create a better community for the subscribers as well.

00:01:04.120 On that note, thank you to Chris, Kelly, and Augustus for becoming paid subscribers on that substack.

00:01:09.380 For those of you that aren't paid subscribers, it's $5 a month or $50 a year,

00:01:14.300 and it will net you some pretty cool perks.

00:01:16.520 The subscriber-only podcast, which goes out once a month,

00:01:19.500 chances to ask the long-dead figures of American history for advice,

00:01:23.060 and access to exclusive video content. Not to give anything away, but if you are as obsessed

00:01:28.400 with the witch trials as I am, you should definitely subscribe for October. We are going 0.90

00:01:33.260 to have some really cool exclusive content this month. And now, on to the history.

00:01:45.100 There have always been women that broke the social norms of western society, but there's

00:01:49.460 one particular period we all tend to think of, or at least I tend to think of, when we think about

00:01:54.800 women who really embraced the concept of Cyndi Lauper's Girls Just Want to Have Fun, and that's

00:02:00.820 the 1920s. But before we can get to the 1920s, as always, we need to spin the dial back a few years 0.87

00:02:17.420 and talk about the changes in society that allowed us to reach the flappers of the 1920s.

00:02:22.560 The end of the 19th century sees a slow ebbing away of the Victorian era

00:02:26.840 and the new concepts of womanhood that are a little less strict

00:02:30.300 than the 19th century concept of the cult of domesticity

00:02:33.340 that I've mentioned in a couple of the season one episodes on women's history. 0.54

00:02:37.560 The Gibson Girl and the New Woman both began to rise in popularity in the late 1800s.

00:02:43.060 The Gibson Girl was based on the drawings of artist Charles Dana Gibson

00:02:46.180 in the late 19th century and early 20th.

00:02:48.680 The artist believed his drawings were the composite of thousands of American girls,

00:02:53.080 or as he said it in an interview from 1910,

00:02:55.660 I'll tell you how I got what you've called the Gibson girl. 0.95

00:02:58.520 I saw her on the streets. 0.99

00:02:59.880 I saw her at the theaters.

00:03:01.160 I saw her in the churches.

00:03:02.580 I saw her everywhere and doing everything.

00:03:04.400 I saw her idling on Fifth Avenue and at work behind the counters of the stores.

00:03:08.840 The nation made the type.

00:03:10.400 What Zhang Will calls the melting pot of races has resulted in a certain character.

00:03:14.800 Why should it not also have turned out a certain type of face? 0.96

00:03:17.880 There isn't any Gibson girl, but there are many thousands of American girls,

00:03:22.160 and for that, let us all thank God.

00:03:24.780 He then launches into a long diatribe on how the beauty of men and women

00:03:28.260 is all about natural selection, which, well...

00:03:32.260 We don't have time to unpack all of that!

00:03:36.080 We'll return to the issues of scientific racism in a future episode, certainly,

00:03:40.360 and whether or not this classifies.

00:03:42.580 but the key thing here is that the Gibson girl was just another set of unrealistic ideals for

00:03:48.200 physical attractiveness for women. In Life magazine in 1894, one author wrote that Gibson had a great

00:03:54.780 responsibility on his shoulders because of the thousands of American girls who are trying to

00:03:59.340 live up to the standards of his girls. And it wasn't just the looks that women had to strive 0.95

00:04:03.720 to imitate. The author mentions that Gibson girls were beloved because they were healthy and brave

00:04:09.000 and independent and well-bred she can dance as well as she can run a boys club and she knows as

00:04:14.400 much about golf as french and german she goes to church on sundays recites the ten commandments and

00:04:19.900 reads life every tuesday the gibson girl was the picture of every man's ideal girl apparently

00:04:25.760 basically she's the ultimate cool girl archetype cool girl men always use that don't they as their

00:04:33.880 defining compliment. She's a cool girl. Cool girl is hot. Cool girl is game. Cool girl is fun.

00:04:41.760 That's not to say that a girl who's dressed as a Gibson girl was likely to slit your throat like 1.00

00:04:46.240 Amazing Amy. I'm just saying the ideal for the Gibson girl was for a type of perfect ideal woman 1.00

00:04:52.140 that men of that era would be drawn to, just as the 21st century cool girl is the idealized fiction

00:04:57.480 of that same perfect woman. And then we come to the new girl. As I said earlier, she's conceptualized

00:05:03.620 around the same time as the Gibson girl, but she's an entirely different kind of creature.

00:05:08.140 Rather than being the creation of a man seeking to represent an idealized version of womanhood,

00:05:13.080 the term was coined, as far as we can tell, by an Irish writer named Sarah Grand in 1894 when she

00:05:18.800 wrote The New Aspect of the Woman Question, in which she used it to refer to independent women

00:05:23.820 who were seeking radical social change. The opening line of the article is one of the best

00:05:28.420 things I've ever read. It is amusing as well as interesting to note the pause which the new

00:05:33.100 aspect of the woman question has given the bawling brothers, who have hitherto tried to howl down 0.86

00:05:38.540 every attempt on the part of our sex to make the world a pleasanter place to live in. Thank you,

00:05:43.400 Sarah. I am officially using bawling brothers to refer to all whiny misogynists in the future.

00:05:49.380 The new woman was much more political than the Gibson girl. The term would come to be associated 0.99

00:05:53.860 with the newest buzzword of the 19-teens, feminism. The new woman, Grant said, has been sitting apart 0.99

00:06:00.000 in silent contemplation all these years, thinking and thinking, until at last she solved the problem 0.67

00:06:05.420 and proclaimed for herself what was wrong with the home-is-the-woman sphere and prescribed a

00:06:10.300 remedy. I could quote endlessly from the article, but I won't. You can read it for yourself at the

00:06:15.500 link in the substack for today's episode. And so the new woman was born in the early 20th century,

00:06:20.820 and unlike the Gibson girl whose popularity gradually faded out, the new woman's political

00:06:25.940 impact would see women becoming a major force for change in all sorts of areas related to women's

00:06:30.840 rights, from women's suffrage to birth control, both of which are topics I'll save for another 0.84

00:06:35.680 episode. There's a lot going on in America at the beginning of the 1920s. The First World War has

00:06:41.280 come to an end, and the men are all coming home from the war. The Harlem Renaissance is kicking 0.77

00:06:45.700 off. For the first time in American history, more people are living in the cities than the rural 0.52

00:06:50.880 areas, and women have the vote. Well, white women anyway, and these new cultural ideas of what the 1.00

00:06:57.740 role of women should and could be would only grow in popularity as the 1920s roars to life. 1.00

00:07:04.040 There's a combination of factors that allows women to begin to have a more independent lifestyle 0.94

00:07:08.520 during this period. The first is the vote. Women's suffrage, the major fight of the 19th and early 1.00

00:07:13.980 20th century women's rights organizations, is won, as I said, for the most part. Second, the war. 0.91

00:07:20.880 World War I had given women more freedom in America, especially when it came to work. 0.98

00:07:25.580 While women had always worked outside the home, depending on their economic status,

00:07:29.880 the war had put far more women into the workplace, and that maintained to a certain degree even once the war ended.

00:07:36.100 By 1929, more than a quarter of all women and more than half of all single women were employed.

00:07:41.960 Greater numbers of working-class women worked outside the home in factories, stores, and offices,

00:07:46.100 and growing numbers of middle-class women attended college and entered professional careers.

00:07:50.880 We also begin to see a new morality at play in the post-war world.

00:07:54.880 Birth control options become more varied, reliable, and easier to get, with methods

00:07:59.420 such as the first rudimentary diaphragm becoming accessible for the first time.

00:08:03.560 There's also a growing public understanding of reproductive and sexual health after World

00:08:07.920 War I, when there had been quite a lot of STDs being spread by our boys overseas.

00:08:14.620 The birth rate fell, the divorce rate increased, rates of sexual activity both before and outside

00:08:20.080 marriage also increase. Ever heard of a petting party before? Because they were pretty popular

00:08:25.280 in the 1920s. Paula Fast, professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley,

00:08:30.460 describes these parties this way. Parties where young people did quite a lot of erotic exploration,

00:08:36.260 kissing, and fondling. Certainly a change from the more prudish associations we have with the

00:08:41.340 Victorian era, though those associations aren't that historically accurate either, but we can

00:08:46.300 talk about that in another episode. All of these things come together to create the perfect

00:08:50.900 situation for the birth of one of the most iconic female aesthetics of the 1920s, the flapper. 1.00

00:08:57.260 Flappers were mostly middle-class white women, but they flouted all the rules of polite middle-class 1.00

00:09:02.180 society. They dated without chaperones, smoked and drank in public, showed off their legs in 1.00

00:09:07.520 short dresses, and danced the Charleston with very little regard for how seeing their ankles

00:09:11.800 might inflame the men around them. Good for them!

00:09:16.300 the flapper magazine began publishing in 1922 in one june 1922 edition they published this poem

00:09:29.840 about the new-fashioned girl let them sing of the girls of a long long ago who were shocked if their

00:09:36.000 elbow or stockings did show but i'll chant of the maidens whose ankles are free to show their half

00:09:41.580 socks and the shape of their knees. Let them praise those back numbers who turned in their 0.93

00:09:46.220 toes and painted and fainted when men would propose, compared to the short-skirted, bob-headed 0.99

00:09:51.540 fry who meet all proposals with right to the eye. Let them shed all their tears in a crocodile 1.00

00:09:56.760 pour for the simple simp sister who flourished of yore, but I'll cast my vote in the way that I feel

00:10:02.460 for the girl self-reliant, bright, snappy, and real. It's easy to dismiss the flapper women of 0.98

00:10:08.780 the 1920s as purely hedonistic, just a pleasure seeker rather than the political feminist new

00:10:14.160 woman we were talking about earlier. And many at the time did. But the truth is much more

00:10:18.960 complicated. As I mentioned earlier in the episode, the women of the 1920s were the epitome of girls 0.99

00:10:24.420 just want to have fun. And that song is on my feminine rage playlist for a reason. These new 1.00

00:10:30.000 modern women saw personal fulfillment and independence as priorities rather than domestic 0.99

00:10:34.780 duties in 1922 zelda fitzgerald the icon of flapperdom as she called it wrote this the 1.00

00:10:41.760 flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub debism bobbed her hair put on her choicest pair of

00:10:46.700 earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into the battle she flirted because it 1.00

00:10:51.620 was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure she covered her face 0.73

00:10:56.840 with powder and paint because she didn't need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she 1.00

00:11:01.700 wasn't boring. She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to

00:11:06.820 do. Basically, the flappers were the 1920s version of this. You gotta fight for your right to party.

00:11:18.440 Of course, this didn't mean that everyone was pro-flapper, and honestly, most of the rhetoric

00:11:23.100 used to denounce these girls and women in the 1920s should sound pretty familiar to you,

00:11:27.940 since it could have come from any number of evangelical pastors today

00:11:31.620 just as easily as it came from the ones in the 1920s.

00:11:35.300 For instance, an evangelist known as the Texas Tornado told the New York Times, 0.91

00:11:39.440 Girls think more of their eyelashes and nude hosiery than they do of decency.

00:11:44.480 Home life is broken up. 0.98

00:11:45.960 Respectful law goes with it.

00:11:47.700 Wholesale iniquity follows.

00:11:49.300 Then, war.

00:11:50.740 I had no idea that my mascara was that powerful.

00:11:54.080 Thank you, Texas Tornado.

00:11:55.840 One college president said,

00:11:57.280 And in 1922, Kathleen Norris said that 0.99

00:12:27.280 day would want to be sweet and dignified women, but wouldn't know how. So basically it's every

00:12:33.020 Fox News show's coverage of a Taylor Swift concert or Ben Shapiro's cringe-inducing commentary on

00:12:38.780 WAP. So I asked my wife for a differential diagnosis for the sake of these ladies in case 1.00

00:12:43.220 they need to go to the doctor. I mean, like this, this is a problem. I mean, like if, if this is 1.00

00:12:47.840 like there's water pouring out the front doors of this place and that ain't water guys. I mean,

00:12:51.700 that's what, that's what I'm being told. That ain't water. So the medical diagnosis, here was

00:12:55.500 her differential. Her differential diagnosis, my wife, the doctor, was either these women are 0.99

00:12:59.660 suffering from bacterial vaginosis or a yeast infection, or my wife suggested most probably 0.98

00:13:07.020 they are suffering from trichomonas. First, Ben, I think you might have meant trichomoniasis. Maybe

00:13:12.660 try practicing the pronunciation of medical terms that you don't understand before saying them on

00:13:17.700 the air. And my listeners, I'm sorry you had to listen to that. I'm even sorrier that I had to

00:13:22.940 listened to it more than once while editing this episode. But honestly, I'm still laughing at how

00:13:27.840 many times he references my wife, the doctor, in this one clip. And just imagine going on your own

00:13:33.760 radio show and telling on yourself like that. It's amazing. And I will be laughing about it until the

00:13:39.600 day Ben Shapiro dies. Or the day his wife finally divorces him. Either way. But of course, for every

00:13:46.300 flapper, there was a pick-me, I'm-not-like-other-girls-I-like-corsets-and-chaperones 0.96

00:13:51.400 type of girl just around the corner. The term that we can use to refer to them would be 1.00

00:13:56.080 traditionalists. Traditionalists are exactly what they sound like. Traditional men and women who

00:14:01.200 didn't go in for all that flapper nonsense and modernism. Modernism and traditionalism clashed

00:14:06.860 quite badly in the 1920s, with traditionalists working to pass laws to restrict the new morality

00:14:12.300 of the period, including laws which led to some rather famous photographs of police officers

00:14:17.440 measuring to make sure women's swimsuits were no higher than six inches above the knee.

00:14:22.220 I'd like to see them try that on a beach today. 0.81

00:14:24.900 Traditionalists would begin to surge more and more towards a fundamentalist version of religion,

00:14:29.580 which would reject modern science, like that whole evolution thing,

00:14:33.220 which would all come to a head with the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925.

00:14:37.440 So basically, we're living through an exact replica of the Roaring Twenties,

00:14:41.280 and I don't like it one bit.

00:14:43.260 To bring that point a little closer to home,

00:14:45.620 let's let Sinclair Lewis describe the traditionalist as he did in his 1920 book,

00:14:50.820 Main Street. It is an unimaginatively standardizing background, a sluggishness of

00:14:56.220 speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable.

00:15:01.300 It is contentment, the contentment of the quiet dead who are scornful of the living for their

00:15:06.040 restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition

00:15:11.960 of happiness it is slavery self-sought and self-defended it is dullness made god a savorless

00:15:18.520 people gulping tasteless food and sitting afterward coatless and thoughtless in rocking chairs prickly

00:15:24.340 with inane decorations listening to mechanical music saying mechanical things about the excellence

00:15:29.600 of ford automobiles and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world honestly i just like to

00:15:35.660 know how it is that in 1920 sinclair lewis was able to describe every single modern cracker barrel

00:15:41.320 I've ever gone to eat at. But basically, he's describing everyone who watches Fox News today

00:15:47.180 in that one paragraph. Of course, while flappers were partying it up in style during the 1920s,

00:15:52.980 it wasn't as if women had reached equality. The 1920s still had a lot of glass ceilings yet to 1.00

00:15:58.500 be broken. The increase of working women didn't really represent a challenge to traditional gender 1.00

00:16:03.620 roles for the most part. Nearly a third of working women in the 1920s were domestic servants,

00:16:08.560 while the rest were clerical workers, factory workers, store clerks, and other pink-collar

00:16:13.280 professions. Married women were still expected to devote themselves to running the household 0.99

00:16:17.840 and raising the children. Employers had a right to fire women after they married or had children. 1.00

00:16:23.180 Single women, whether divorced or widowed, also faced many challenges. For instance,

00:16:27.940 male co-signers were required even for unmarried women to take out a credit application. 1.00

00:16:33.260 Even women who blazed trails in politics would face barriers due to their gender. 1.00

00:16:37.740 Most female office holders worked primarily on what were seen as women's issues, 1.00

00:16:42.820 preventing them from acquiring too much power within their own political parties. 1.00

00:16:46.880 You weren't very likely to see a woman on the United States House Committee of Armed Services 1.00

00:16:51.100 or any masculine jobs like that. 0.99

00:16:53.980 So as usual for any social change in America, 0.95

00:16:56.520 it was three steps forward, two steps back at every turn.

00:16:59.920 But if you look at a timeline of the feminist movement, 0.99

00:17:02.620 you'll often see it broken up into waves.

00:17:04.620 The years of those waves vary slightly depending upon your source, but generally they have one

00:17:09.800 thing in common no matter what. The 1920s is completely left out. The first wave runs from

00:17:16.080 the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 to the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920.

00:17:21.980 Then for four decades, apparently there was no such thing as a feminist movement if traditional

00:17:27.200 history is to be believed, because apparently the flappers don't count, which doesn't really

00:17:32.360 make any sense. Maybe their fight wasn't as intellectually stimulating or pleasing as that

00:17:37.580 of women's suffrage, but it was no less of a fight for women's autonomy. The right to live our lives 0.97

00:17:42.940 as we see fit, whether that means running for Congress or flashing some knee and ankle on the

00:17:47.700 dance floor. Feminism doesn't always have to look like Alice Paul standing outside the White House. 1.00

00:17:52.820 Sometimes it looks like Josephine Baker dancing the Charleston. 0.99

00:18:02.360 you gonna live your life right oh mother dear we're not the fortunate ones oh girls they wanna 0.98

00:18:11.220 have fun oh girls they wanna have fun thanks for showing up once more to listen to me bitch about 0.98

00:18:20.660 history please remember to subscribe to the bitchy history sub stack and i'll see you back 0.87

00:18:24.680 here next week for real this time my schedule is finally normalizing a bit but we'll see how long 1.00

00:18:30.540 that lass.

Bitchy History - October 03, 2023

2.3 - Flappers and Feminism

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