From MS Magazine blog, see whole blog at:
http://msmagazine.com/blog/2013/05/06/gatsby-gets-flappers-wrong/
"Indeed, Zelda, who was ultimately diagnosed with schizophrenia and died at an insane asylum, spent most of her marriage struggling to define herself as an artist and her own person. Her husband copied liberally from her journals and letters for his novels. When she finally wrote an autobiographical novel of her marriage in 1932, Save Me the Waltz, he edited out several of the stories that he intended to use for his own, 1934’s Tender Is the Night.
But Zelda, as fearless and trail-blazing as she was, can’t even embody the flapper movement fully. For one, it was not all white women, as NYU’s Modern America reports: “For the time being, the bob and the entire Flapper wardrobe, united blacks and whites under a common hip-culture.” Secondly, the flapper’s rebellion against Victorian sexual mores didn’t start among the high-society debutantes but in “working-class neighborhoods and radical circles in the early 1900s before it spread to middle-class youth and college campuses.”
The flapper movement wasn’t simply a fashion trend, as Emily Spivack at Smithsonian.com’s Threaded blog explains; it was a full-blown, grassroots feminist revolution. After an 80-year campaign by suffragists, women were finally granted the right to vote in the United States in 1920, when the 19th Amendment was passed. When the U.S. entered World War I in April 1917, many women entered the workforce, and when the soldiers returned in November 1918, their female counterparts were reluctant to give up their jobs.
As a result, young, unmarried women experienced far greater financial independence than they’d ever had before. Bicycles, and then cars, allowed them to get around town without a male escort. The spread of electric lighting allowed nightclubs to flourish, just as the Prohibition Amendment of 1919 forced them to go underground. Drinking at illegal “speakeasies” became a thrilling part of flapper culture.
Inspired by Cubist art and Art Nouveau haute couture, flappers rejected the dramatic, hyper-feminine S-shaped Edwardian silhouette created by tight, time-consuming corsets for sheath dresses that gave them boxy boyish shapes. This straight up-and-down figure was so extreme that curvier women went out of their way to squeeze into girdles and bandage their breasts flat. These radical women pushed the boundaries of androgyny even further by chopping off their long Edwardian locks for bobbed hairstyles.
At the same time, flappers revealed a shocking amount of skin. The older generation was absolutely outraged by the site of bare knees and arms, which flappers would highlight with loads of bangles. They were also appalled by the red lips, rouged cheeks and kohl-lined eyes of flappers, as previously only prostitutes had worn makeup. So flappers were derided for being both too masculine and too titillating."
Why do we keep reading male writers who have their own agendas, especially in their descriptions of women and women's behaviors? Not only was FSF misleading in his description of the flapper, but he stole Zelda's journals and included the info in his books as his own! And we call HIM the great American novelist!?! Are literature teachers still teaching FSF? Are they reading real history and discussing the misinformation in their classes?
I must admit that i see alot of FSF's vacuous flappers in today's young women's dress. The lack of common sense in wearing SIX inch heels, spandex dresses that they can't sit in, mini skirts in which they are obviously incomfortable!?! WTH? They think they are sexy? Well, i've got news for them, if you have to shuffle and not stride across a room, it ain't sexy! What happens to smart women's minds when the fashion gurus,or the Kardashian sisters, dress women, or themselves, in obviously uncomfortable clothing? Being uncomfortable denies sexy, except maybe to 15 yr old boys who get excited at any hint of flesh above the knee.
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