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# 2025-05-08 - The Uninhibited Flapper by Helen Bullitt Lowry
(IMG) Helen Bullitt Lowry Watching Puritanism Set The Flapper Free
Recently i read a Smithsonian Magazine article about flappers that
caught my imagination because it described them as avid readers.
This drove a wedge into my mental map of flapperdom, leading me to
believe that there was more to it than the foxtrot.
(DIR) Flappers, Flippers, Masculine Women and Feminine Men
Then, i stumbled on this article, which gives social commentary,
analyzing flapperdom and its puritanical context. One insight was
that puritanical culture depends on a double life, or in other words,
dishonesty. Flappers favored direct communication and honesty, which
requires more integrity.
Without further ado, here is the full text of the article:
Two generations ago the girl was "damned." One generation ago she was
"ruined." Now, according to the best authorities and her own
valuation, she has just played out of luck.
So that for the reformers and prohibitionists, the censors and the
woman's club resolutionists! Their bi-product is Miss Twentieth
Century Unlimited, the one uninhibited creature in a Volsteaded
civilisation. Controls--of liquor and of birth--have given us The
Flapper. The official reformers, reinforcing the sagging inhibitions
and corsets of the nineteenth century, were just the final impetus
needed to drive her out into the open.
The flapper is released from the strangle hold that is throttling the
rest of us. If somebody makes a law for her, she promptly and
blithely breaks it, the pocket flask for the moment being the outward
and visible sign of the spirit--and spirits--of her wide-flung
rebellion. It is the milepost between the time that was and the time
that is, that flask, and to it we owe the single standard of drinking.
A half generation ago the sub-debs did not indulge in anything more
relaxing than coca cola. And even first and second year debbies did
their drinking from glasses issued by the hostess, not in triplicate.
If a young man of the period imported a flask from the outside, that
young man was promptly dropped from polite society, no matter how
stringent was the shortage of dancing beaux. [They called a flask a
"bottle of whiskey" in those days.]
Wild oats were reserved for the boys at college. If you were of Eve's
sheltered sex, you really had to become a member of the Fast Young
Married Crowd before you could get a look in. That Fast Young Married
Crowd was the first to come out of the biological fastnesses of the
Mid-Victorian era into the cocktails and jazz of our Mid-Victrolian
period.
Moral: You had to keep yourself the kind of a girl you'd been told a
man wanted to marry, if you ever wanted to join in a cocktail party
and slide down the banisters uninhibited--as rumor had it the Fast
Young Married Crowd was doing on its orgies. Over the border of
matrimony lay the mysteries of the gay wild life.
In that era before our morals were legislated, being "that kind of a
girl" was a trying responsibility. There was an approved technique
that every wise virgin had to master. It consisted of letting each
man, on whom she conferred her favors, think that she really was in
love with him. She called it "being engaged." And,--if perchance she
came to possess a harem of fiances,--remember that the young things
of the period were not so well able to conduct their own courtings as
our present-day emancipated flappers. They still had to depend on
what the tide washed in. They still did their picking from those that
picked them--and sorted 'em over at their leisure.
Then, too, a half generation ago, we had not read our Freud. We did
not know the jargon of sex. Both man and girl were apt to call
"in love" the emotion which our present-day young things frankly call
something else. Thus came it that the petting parties of the period
operated under the left wing of a near-engagement.
Yet there was a weakness to the system. Each fiance had the lordly
impression that he "possessed" the lady of his choice. And the minute
the male feels that he possesses a woman, he can get all the
psychology of "riding away" and leaving her. Our Freudian flappers
are better strategians. Man simply can't labor under the impression
that he possesses a young person, if her lingo is calling the once
sacred kiss just a "flash of pash." Applied slang is a great leveller
of romance.
For times have changed since it was good form for a maid to avoid the
crass mention of sex. With prohibition has come such an outburst of
Get Moral Quick legislation that the reaction is now being felt
throughout the length and breadth of the flapper. The legislators
would lengthen the skirts to protect the defenceless male from a
chance thought of legs and the like. Whereat the flapper retaliates
by conversing pretty ceaselessly about--well, say associated
subjects.
Last season the writer, being of the genus Successfully Single, woke
up with a start to realize that two desirables had toyed with her
hook--and retreated. One of them had even exited, uttering a fatal
accusation about a "trammelled soul." Such a warning calls for a
taking of stock. And this is what I found: Because of the flappers
and the way they run shop, the whole technique of the man game has
changed. My method, alas, had become as out of style as a pompadour
Gibson hat. Where once girls pretended to know less and to have
experienced less than they actually had, now they pretend to more.
Therein lie all the law and the social profits. Therefore Rule One of
these dauntless rebels reads: It is not an insult but a compliment
for an admirer to explain that his intentions are frankly carnivorous.
To my ten-year-old technique had still been clinging the cobwebs of
the past, when even Launcelot's intentions were painted as slightly
honorable. But now--the shades of Alfred Lord Tennyson help us!--it
has become the smart procedure to take Man's bold bad intentions
right out into the conversation and pretend to be tempted by them.
The truth of the matter is that those pseudoengagements of the
fox-trot decade really were furnishing a charge account psychology.
Man could close his eyes and whisper, "Some day, my own," and still
go nicely on a Ladies Home Journal cover design of "Under the
Mistletoe." But, when our flapper is not even pretending to him that
she is going to marry him, and when he is not even pretending to
himself that he is going to marry her--well, the whole sex game has
then been put on a frank cash and carry basis.
Mark well, however, these worldly-wise young things of this the third
year of our Prohibition are not necessarily less virtuous technically
than their own crinolined grandmothers. Only these days they are not
bragging about their virtue.
"And have all the men afraid of you, for fear they'll be responsible
for teaching you something," explains one practical miss. "Men like
to find you in stock, ready-taught. We know how to take care of
ourselves--so we let them think what they want." In short, the whole
new game, as the earnest disciple from the half generation ago
learned it, is not to reveal the dark secret that you abide by the
Ten Commandments. Man must not suspect that you are unattainable. He
must just think that he has not attained you--yet. If you want to
compete with the flappers, you've got to play by the flapper rules.
Check your conversational inhibitions!
And if by chance there be any inhibitions left over, Prohibition has
obligingly introduced new opportunities for privacy, that will help
you check them too. When a couple strays off now from group
formation, there's a perfectly good alibi available of finding a
sheltered spot for a drink. Where once it really wasn't good form to
go to a man's hotel room, now it is the national custom for the owner
of hootch to register a casket for his jewel--and then invite the
young things in, one by one. A flapper these nights can retire to
that hotel bedroom for an hour in the middle of a dance. The girl is
not "talked about," and the place is not "pulled." Even the house
detective knows that she is innocently drinking a drink.
Thus has this rebel young generation forced out into the open country
with it all the contented young women in their late twenties and
early thirties, who may not have been feeling rebellious at all. And
the wives of forty-five also, to compete all over again for their own
husbands. For "poaching" on the wifely preserves has become the
favorite flapper sport!
"Married men," having been forbidden to unmarried young persons for
three chaste generations, our flappers, bi-product of inhibition, are
promptly appropriating the husbands. This one item of the flapper
raid on the married men has done more than the entire twentieth
century put together to change the smug structure of American
society, and bring us back to normalcy.
Before 1865 no Southern belle considered herself worth her salt
unless all the courtly old married men in the country kissed her hand
and competed with the young blades for her quadrilles. But when black
persons stopped buttoning up the shoes of the Quality, America
entered upon her 1870's, her sombre brown stone fronts, and her
cloistered husbands. The money for doing society had simply passed
into the hands of the descendants of Miles Standish and Priscilla,
who carried their consciences into their sober mansions with them.
The Age of Innocence was upon us, and has clung close ever since.
From that fatal day on to 1917 each oncoming debutante was taught by
her mother to give unto the genus, married man, her most impersonal
manner, lest she provoke his "undesirable attentions." If poaching
was done, it was from behind a tree. Unmarried girls knew that their
place was not in somebody else's home in those days. The wives could
protect their preserves by the simple expedient of "talking about"
any unmarried young female caught on the married reservations.
And so it came to pass that the pick of the men were posted, because,
as fast as a callow youth gets worth marrying, somebody promptly
marries him. The Fast Young Married Crowd was a closed corporation
and played exclusively within itself; the female of the species had
to compete only with females of equal tonnage. The only sylph-like
temptation that a husband could encounter was a dissolute person
whose reputation had already been ruined--and she didn't count,
because nobody invited her to parties anyway. A wife could get as fat
as she wanted to in those days.
Even today that same leisurely life might exist for the wives. Even
today the wives might be resting their feet under the bridge tables,
secure in the consciousness that no bobbed haired young poacher was
daring to dance with their husbands, if they had just let
prohibitions enough alone--if they had only not been swept away by
the high sport of gossiping about our Wild Young People, which struck
the country in the summer of 1920. This gossip was an intrinsic phase
of the virtue wave which always immediately precedes a crime wave.
The wives just at this point, instead of sitting tight, made the
strategic mistake of turning the full force of the ammunition of
gossip, which should have been saved for defending husbands from
poachers, into an offensive attack on the flapper's lip stick, on her
cigarettes, and on her petting parties. Whenever two or three wives
were gathered together, their topic was our Wild Young People. That
summer, too, saw the launching of that now seasoned romance about the
checking of corsets. The resolutions at clubs were being resolved.
The preachers were sermonizing. The up-state legislators were
drafting bills against flappers' smoking cigarettes.
Human nature can be pushed just so far. Instead of reforming, the
young things apparently decided one might as well lose a reputation
for stealing a husband as for smoking a cigarette. The whole arsenal
for combating poachers blew up.
To make matters worse, in the excitement of the virtue wave our Wild
Young People had been attacked as a group instead of as individuals.
That was the second mistake. The whole strength of gossip consists in
selecting one member of the clan for calumny, to stand out disgraced
and alone among her exemplary sisters. Because the flappers had been
gossiped about en masse, the whole reason for not being gossiped
about had ceased. The poacher of that half generation ago had been
the kind of a girl who stalked her game alone.
But, when all the girls in town are seeking to steal your husband,
what are you going to do about it, if you are a woman of forty-five
with a heaviness around the hips and a disinclination to learn the
camel walk? Nor can you get the poachers off the scent by crossing
the trail with an eligible bachelor. Logically, the young things
should have enough sense to ignore a preempted husband and attend to
the serious business of getting themselves husbands. But they
haven't. They seem to prefer the husbands of the other women. And
curiously, the more they engage in this exotic sport of poaching, the
less keen they become about owning a property for somebody else to
poach on.
The real interstate joke on Puritanism is that the flapper, who flaps
because Puritanism has driven her to it, will automatically bring
about its cure. The whole vitality of Puritanism rests on the
unswerving principle of letting not thy right hand know what thy left
hand doeth, if thy left hand is doing something it shouldn't.
Puritanism could not last out a week-end without the able assistance
of the standardized double life.
And that is just what the flappers refuse to respect. They are even
insisting on being taken along on the parties, which, by all the
rules of Rolf and Comstock should be confined to man's double life.
Where the chorus lady was once the only brand that had the proper and
improper equipment to jazz up an evening, now mankind has come to
prefer the flapper, who drinks as much as the Broadwayite, is just as
peppy and not quite so gold-diggish.
"It is so simple," smiles Barbara nonchalantly blowing her smoke
rings. "You old dears set man an impossible standard. As he had
always to be pretending holy emotions whenever he was around you he
just naturally had to get away half the time, to rest the muscles of
his inhibitions. Why, you funny old things actually drove man into
his double life, just as you made all of his best stories have two
editions, one for a nice girl and one for--well say one not so nice.
Our crowd has done more than all of your silly old social hygiene
commissions to bring nearer the single standard--by going part way to
meet him."
The preachers are wasting their time when they rail that the flappers
are painting their faces like "fallen women." Of course they are
painting them that way--for the very good reason that mankind has
demonstrated too unmistakably that that kind of woman has "a way with
her."
Not so long ago cosmetics became a moral issue. The curl rag was the
only beautifier that somehow never lost its odor of sanctity--and
that was doubtless because curl rags were a perfectly logical part of
the long-sleeved Canton flannel nightgown civilization. Curls
couldn't be so very wrong when they were so frightfully unbecoming in
the making. And so the "good woman" handed over intact to her weaker
sister every beautifier that the world had been eight thousand years
accumulating.
Slowly, timidly the allurements returned. The talcum powder bought
for baby surreptitiously reached the nose. When the half generation
ago was young, we had adopted a certain lip salve, just one shade
darker than the way lips come, explaining, to save our reputations,
that we were keeping our lips from chapping. Rouge too had come
coyly; back--but--and here's the gist of the whole matter--in polite
society paint was put on to imitate nature.
We were still doing our make-up as man conducted his double
life--with intent to deceive the general public. We still belonged at
heart to the Puritan era, in spite of our wicked fox-trot. All may
have been artificial below the neck, from our Gossard corsets with
their phalanx of garters on to our hobble skirts. But above the neck,
we pretended it was natural.
The flapper has changed all that. She has turned the lady up side
down, as well as the world. For the flapper is au naturale below the
neck. Above the neck she is the most artificially and entertainingly
painted creature that has graced society since Queen Elizabeth. With
one bold stroke of a passionately red lip stick, she has painted out
Elaine the Fair and the later-day noble Christie Girl and painted in
an exotic young person, meet to compete alike with a Ziegfield show
girl, with a heavenborn Egyptian princess or even a good Queen Bess,
who could not move her face after it was dressed up for the morning.
And Bess was the Virgin Queen. The American-Victorian is indeed the
only era in history when cosmetics became a moral issue. Even in dour
Cromwellian England, rouge registered the wrong politics but not
immorality. We are merely getting back to normalcy in cosmetics--back
behind the dun wall of the Victorian era.
And it is the flapper who has done it for us. What's more, she has
done it frankly and purposefully--because the reformer, in his naive
innocence, has explained to her that what she is doing is wicked and
will get that kind of "results." Similarly those of 'em who had not
yet taken off their corsets at dances, promptly did so when shocked
elders began repeating the corset checking story. Dear heart, the
only reason that they had not done so before was because the little
dears hadn't heard that the worst people were using ribs instead of
whalebone that season.
Vice would die out from disuse, if the reformers did not advertise.
(HTM) Nonsenseorship (illustrated)
(DIR) Nonsenseorship (plaintext)
tags: article,gender,history
# Tags
(DIR) article
(DIR) gender
(DIR) history