The Roaring Twenties resulted in a myriad of changes in American society, but one prominent change was with respects to women – most specifically, the social phenomenon of the flapper.
Consider a few historical points. First, remember the flapper movement began after the Civil War. Unhappy with their clothing options, job prospects and the general comportment society required them to engage in, women began to agitate for change. The changes were superficial at first, as the requirement to wear floor-length dresses was a universal complaint shared by both liberal and conservative women. They wanted to be able to expose more skin and have more options for their hair. They also wanted to venture more outside the home for jobs. Once again, representing the privilege of American feminism.
The flapper bubble heated up during WWI, when women flocked to the factories to help out in the war effort. This source of serious independent income helped spark the movement’s explosion after the war. Also, the Spanish Flu epidemic broke out on the heels of the WWI, as the close quarters and diverse mix of cultures involved helped spread the disease. This put off the economic recovery for a few years, until 1920. In addition, the Temperance Movement had gotten Prohibition passed, thus setting up alcohol as illegal and taboo, thus increasing its appeal to young women. The creation of Fed lead to the creation of cheap credit, which helped fuel the economic and social bubble of the Roaring Twenties. Also, this was the same year the women gained the right to vote in the US. The economic independence gained by women during the war, coupled with the power to vote and toss in the fact that over 53,000 young men died in the war seriously increased the competition for men.
This era gave birth the flapper girl. This woman was a primitive modern woman. She still retained many feminine virtues, but still tried to defy sex stereotypes. What is most striking is her modified approach to fashion. The most identifiable feature of the flapper is the bobbed haircut.
As for women’s fashion, there was the desire to show off arms and shoulders, as well as knee-high skirts. The dresses of the era reflected that. Also, they desired less restrictive clothing – remember the corset? – so the dresses were looser and less form-fitting. They flirted with audacious jewelry and all manner of boyish haircuts. They also broke sex barriers by wearing all sorts of hats. They typically expressed their boyishness through their haircut. By and large, they considered wearing excessive amounts of makeup and bright, red lipstick to be a sign of empowerment.
The flapper approach to social comportment is also striking. Remember, alcohol was illegal, so speakeasies and all manner of back-alley bar reigned supreme – most Americans largely ignored Prohibition. However, the flapper went all-in on this. Previously, smoking, drinking and generally bar-going was a male endeavor. Men would work all day, go the bar and go home drunk. However, women wanted access to these places and so they went. Women were sometimes seen half naked, cigarette in one hand, drink in the other in a speakeasy. Women also began to participate in mass consumption as an individual, not a partner.
Consider evolving approaches to sexuality. Dating and casual sex mores were loosened for the flapper. Some solid research on effective birth control methods arose late in the 1800’s, but it was against the law to disseminate it. However, it trickled down to the general population and some birth control clinics opened – most famously the one by Margaret Sanger, who saw birth control as a way to reduce nonwhite populations. However, the flapper used these methods to allow her to exploit her hypergamy. She flirted shamelessly with men in bars and in public. She reveled in the positive attention she gained from men noticing her slender arms and exposed ankles. We would not get it today in 2013, but at the time, it probably blew men’s minds to see such skin exposed in open society.
Flappers saw manipulating men sexually through their looks to be the epitome of empowerment. They prided themselves on their use of makeup, fashion and open flirting with men. They also experimented with lesbianism; the book “The Well Of Loneliness,” was published in 1928. Such a book could not have hit publishers 20 years before. There were some high-profile lesbians in society, at this point. Places like Harlem were more accepting of homosexuality, but as usual, it was female homosexuality, not male.
Women saw freely hooking up as empowerment. However, this was not their only change in their relationships with men at large. They began to question the whole makeup of society. Flappers considered men to be privileged at the expense of women and sought to invert these roles. Magazines targeted at flappers continued to develop primitive feminist theory. As expected, there were beta males who identified with flappers – they were called flippers.
![[Image: 2130593.jpg?226]](http://www.ultimatehistoryproject.com/uploads/3/0/6/7/3067335/2130593.jpg?226)
Women did not just seek access to venues to fuck men, they sought access to other places generally off limits to women. They sought to participate in sports, from hockey to baseball. Some wrote manifestos about how men and women are equals on the field; but women had those delusions ground up by reality when men allowed them to the take the field. They also increasingly sought access to college. Colleges became known for “necking parties” or “petting parties,” where emphasis was on kissing and touching, but no sex. Clearly, the lack of true, reliable birth control played a part in this, but it seems to be another way for women to feel out for sexually attractive men.
However, the most striking point of the flapper was their resistance to relevance. They emphasized fashion, flirting and fun. They despised the work ethic of their mothers and desired a world of nothing by good looks, sex and listening to music and watching movies. As such, they helped popularize the Charleston and jazz. Their lives were supremely superficial – which is exactly what they wanted. They did not want the real responsibilities of being a wife or mother. Part of this mindset might have been the hardship of the war, but they did not suffer in any way close to the women of Europe. They were just entitled, narcissistic women just waiting to burst out and had their chance in the Roaring Twenties.
Corporations took advantage of this. They helped popularize the look of the empowered woman smoking a cigarette. Women took to this as empowered, but really just lined the tobacco company’s pockets with silver. Women spent all of their wages on all sorts of new trappings; as such, they helped develop modern consumer culture. Government and corporations knew they had a new cash cow – women. It isn’t any surprise a federal income tax got laid in the 1910’s along with the creation of the Fed. It was all in the cards, as cheap money leads to cheap morals.
However, for all their supposed independence, gumption and empowerment, the stock market crash in 1929 ended the movement. The poverty most Americans were thrust into resulted in flappers really taking on a bad light – they were seen as petty and a burden. Only wealthy and productive societies can afford such privilege to a class of women.
The poverty that became the United States forced the flapper to face realities. One, is that female economic independence is rarely correlated with actual productivity, as women usually piggy-back on male productivity. War-time may force them into productive capacities, but when given the chance; they may rue the loss of income, but women prefer nonproductive jobs where they can self-aggrandize. Second, is that social stability, especially in times of hardship, is predicated not just on the nuclear family, but all members of the family supporting each other. Third, is the idea that superficiality is worthless for society. Not being a mother and wife, or at least being a productive worker, hurts society.
Of course, women went back into the house, being a wife and a mother. They did often work outside the home if they could, but as we already know, women are only interested in an independent income for themselves. However, these women are members of the Silent Generation. Their behaviors – although not universal, to be sure – laid the groundwork for the Sexual Revolution and second-wave feminism.
This!
This is akin to the “Gonzo Historian” at AVFM. We need more of this.
Feminists love to claim how oppressive things were before “they came” to prominence in the 60s and 70s. It is utter BS.
What they fail to realize is that the pill, DNA testing, and the coming storm of the male birth control option will blow all their privilege away. They fail to grasp how good women had it back then compared to the men. They will soon find out.
Difference between them and modern women is that modern women are pushed into slut factories called high schools and colleges where education is at the bottom of the list. And are in debt from which many cannot recover. The OSU article coming out about athletes and the perks they get, the women in college programs who are nothing more than whores working for colleges which are in reality pimps, and the money behind it all is just another indication of how corrupt everything is and has always been.
One conclusion I draw is that the money and power elites support feminism, corrosion of the family, unrestricted consumerism, and other socially irresponsible trends in order to make more money for themselves. They act to increase their corporate profits, regardless of the consequences to the health of a society.
Exactly, and feminists are being useful idios who don’t realize who the true puppet masters are today.
That’s half of it, and the lesser half.
The other half is that breaking up the extended family prevents families from “keeping it in the family” and thus preventing the rise of family dynasties to compete for a place at the top.
The Kennedys and Bushes have family compounds. You are trained to believe that if you live with your family you are parasitic scum.
Exactly the opposite is the case. Seperated from your family you are host for the parasitic elites.
I have never EVER thought of it that way. I’d like to see an article expound on this.
Mind fucking blown.
When people talk up divorce, I always point out that the Rotschilds, Kennedy and most dynasties don’t it as much, overall. They stay married and if they’re bored they have affairs, like the monarchs of old. Google Images will show you their family photos. They’re huge and they usually live near each other.
That’s exactly why they managed to create a “dynasty.” Property gets passed down the line. Closeness allows members to keep an eye out for each other and avoid disasters. A “family culture” ensures that wealth doesn’t get wasted and the elders teach members how to preserve and expand it.
A case could be made that it’s in their interest to prevent the formation of rival dynasties by promoting divorce and dislocation, since they cannot lord their power directly over people anymore. In this way, the plebs keep destroying their wealth generation after generation, while they consolidate theirs.
“divorce . . . the Rotschilds, Kennedy and most dynasties don’t it as much . . .”
Suppose the family compound were owned by a family trust whose beneficiaries were only blood relatives.
In other words, your kids inherit directly; bitch gets squat all other than as a side effect of willing association.
The formula lost on the masses. Post within a post.
I totally agree.
I totally agree.
Not really to “increase income for themselves” in an absolute sense. Greater productivity in general allows more for everyone. Instead, what members of the leeching classes (most of the elites) want, is to keep others down; in order to retain their relative rank.
This is true, one need only look at the companies donations to “DV Activists” selling in any shopping mall.
They know they want all money in the hands of women. Think of it, outside of the Sears power tool section, and maybe one or two clothing stores, what the hell else is there for men?
Read Christopher Lasch for more on this point.
Which is utterly retarded, since it sacrifices their long term welfare for short term profits, thus setting their own selves up to be victims in the future.
Were I in their shoes, that’s exactly what I would do to increase profits. It’s the obvious, most logical thing to do. An economically-independent individual is more profitable than a family and easier to exploit.
For example, corroding the family increases consumption, since the households become two. Two rents, two sets of bills, two cars. It also makes the individuals more neurotic and insecure, since they don’t have the institution of the family to turn to anymore. And rudderless, neurotic individuals are easy marks for marketers.
Pushing women towards economic independence opened entirely new (and largely useless) markets such as fashion that were impractical when the man was the main breadwinner.
Then there’s insurance. In a normal surplus-production family, the grandparents would have a considerable savings, ideally at least $1M in total assets if they made good financial decisions throughout their life. Why then should the grandchildren or even children be paying for health insurance? Example: I know a girl whose parents are worth a few million, yet she is paying for health insurance. Why? She should just pay her parents to insure her. Keep the pooled money together in the family. She’ll probably throw $50k down that drain over a few decades.
what about all the deadbeat dads in this soceity! hmmm think they may be part of the problem? You people have some real issues for which you should seek therapy!
Great civilizations depend on virtuous women just as much as they depend on virile men, if not more. Rome and Sparta’s declines can be at least partially attributed to women abandoning thier traditions. Is it a coincidence the America is reaching its apex as feminism peaks? Doubtless not.
Seems like nature put a natural timebomb in every civilization..that bomb is women. ! As soon as one people get too powerful their civilization will soon self destruct because of women.
It’s natures way to keep the world dynamic so one superpower will not rule forever.
Women only do what they perceive that their alpha males want them to do. They don’t have some weird, independent agency to destroy society.
Instead, the mechanism by which women destroy society, is that some men, who randomly happen to be top dogs at some point, realizes women’s natural proclivity to side with to dog simply for being top dog. And hence arranges it such that women are recruited to have a say in matter they were neither intended to, nor equipped for, having a say in. While other men sleep at the wheel, instead of doing what civilization requires of them, which armed rebellion against anyone seeking to advance their own standing by such unnatural and unsustainable means.
Feminism will self correct, as long as the self-chosen childless seduce white knights into a childless relationship. Women who want children are luckily the most feminine with proper feminine, nurturing mindsets. Reproduction alone erodes at feminism each generation. The public schools are the real vector of feminist ideology.
Restore the Roman concept of pater familias, the father as leader of the household, responsible for raising virtuous offspring.
No discussion of the 1920’s is complete without mention of Bix Beiderbecke.
Oh to have been a sideman with Bix and The Wolverines as they tore up campuses and speak-easies across the midwest with their wild Negroe-inspired music. Scandalous for its time, it now sounds quaint to neophyte music enthusiasts who have been weaned on a diet of modern pop and that infernal “rap” nonsense. I urge you to break out of your mold and study the many fine Bix recordings available on “youtube”.
Not to brag, but I once met an old man who had seen Bix live in Hamilton, Ohio around 1925.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bix_Beiderbecke
Thanks for that, Uncle Elmer. My tastes tend to stick closely to the core classical music repertoire, but I’m always open to jazz/blues composers supplementing my diet. The sound of Bix has been drowning out the noise of Sunday Football for the past hour.
Other great music from that era includes Scott Joplin, Louie Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Sidney Bichet, and Fletcher Henderson.
Sony has a 2-CD set of Duke Ellington’s 1927 Okey recordings but can only find these examples on youtube :
I have never tired of listening to these tunes. An Amazon reviewer put it well :
“Okeh Ellington”
“Ellington was and is the embodiment of stylish elegance and musical eloquence. Even the threat in Bubber Miley’s growling trumpet has a warmth in it. Hearing the hottest yet smoothest, most sophisticated of twenties jazz bands perform early versions of “Black and Tan Fantasy,” “East St. Louis Toodle-oo,” “Mood Indigo,” “Rockin’ in Rhythm,” and “The Mooch” is like returning in memory to a precious sound or smell of childhood: the frying of bacon or a gardenia on a Sunday dress. Ellington’s gift was to evoke just such sensations and more–sensuality, sexuality, sobriety, intoxication, solitude, sociability, cordiality, subtlety, even profundity–in musical adventures that still reach, through the medium of jazz, for a cross-racial, cross-cultural universality. This is one of the treasures of the twentieth century.”
From Duke Ellington to Snoop Doggy Dog – it’s a long way down. But, it brings up another issue. For good or ill, ever since Ragtime, black culture dominates American society. Now black culture has a cancer in its soul; Rap and Hip Hop are the symptoms. The impact on the surrounding society large and negative. This does not bode well.
I tell you what though, The “Charleston” is one vigorous dance if you have never tried it. Go ahead and laff you punks. Puts this “twerking” tedium to shame.
nice article
“Post-Depression Era Women”, the generation of women affected by The Depression, went “back into the home,” but they did so resentfully. The “party” was over, and they were fucking pissed! The result? They raised a GENERATION of girls who would listen to thier resentments, and they would make thier daughters swear NOT TO END UP LIKE THEM. “Educate yourself, my daughter,” they would say, “Don’t end up like me, a SLAVE to your father! Don’t cook for ANY man! In fact, don’t even learn how to cook. And don’t learn how to sew either! Go to law school or medical school, travel and see the world, fuck a Arab in Baghdad, give a blowjob to a Chinaman in Peking, in other words LIVE! The cock-carousel is yours, RIDE IT!!!!
And, much more insidiously, they raised a generation of men who met such women with something other than a slap in the face and a public stoning. And that’s the real problem.
Actually this isn’t true. Post-depression era women desperately wanted homes and families after the horrors of WWII.
Their daughters were the dumbasses who invented Feminism, all by themselves. They didn’t get it from their moms.
You need to understand that nothing happens in a vacuum. Everything has an origin and legacy. You yourself have a psychological legacy left from your parents, even if you were adopted. How foolish to think that women in the 1960s “just popped up” and decided to become feminists. They are a legacy of post-WW2 culture that shaped them, and of course their mothers played a part.
Why are you so vulgar and childish? Shut up.
I do agree the 1920’s was horrid, though.
Summary: Feminism is a luxury good. Every society has as much feminism as it can afford.
A luxury good like tobacco. Eventually, those of the less retarded kind, realize that it’s worth literally less than zero, regardless of presentation and packaging.
http://jameshyen.tumblr.com/post/61319068418/the-cat
Reminds me of my father’s mother, who by the standards of 1920’s Arkansas must have seemed like a scarlet woman.
First of all, Grandma bobbed her hair in the Flapper fashion of the time, instead of wearing it long.
Then she learned how to drive a car.
Then she got a job.
And finally, when she learned that Grandpa, from whom she had separated, had picked up a common-law wife in western Oklahoma, she filed for – gasp! – a divorce, on the grounds of bigamy and adultery.
No doubt most of the guys who read Return of Kings know their grandmothers from younger generations than mine. Have you ever wondered if your grandma has a slut background? I suspect mine did, because Dad told me she had a few boyfriends after the divorce before getting remarried.
back the she might have been considered a slut, today she would qualify for monastery
pretty much where the american dream started to become hedonistic consumerist fuckfest, yeah.
its cyclical, though. earlier posts here & elsewhere about birth of chivalry in feudal aristocracies, etc. its just that with each wave the excess grows.
in the future, women will walk around topless, you will be locked up for looking, and she will legally be allowed to marry a donkey show
And in the slightly futurer, if what you say holds, women will walk around the home in a burqa; you’ll probably still be locked up for looking unless she is your wife; and she won’t even be a legal person. Sustainable societies get to decide how the future looks, after all; not freefalling dystopias.
I doubt it. Those ultra-conservative Islamic societies are hardly “sustainable” in the normal sense of the word. In 300 years Afghanistan may still be close to what it is now, but that would only be because they are unable to sink much lower.
And the Romans undoubtedly said the same thing about hill people living pretty much the same way back then.
Boatloads of kids, well raised to kneel to noone, has always been a tough nut to crack for rivals. The safest way to coexist with such cultures has always been to simply stay out of their way.
But instead, via meddling and subsequent refugee populations informing their homelands of infinite riches, held by useless weaklings in faraway lands; the 10 out of 12 kids that has traditionally either starved to death or died fighting each other over food scraps, now is on a march westwards. And what the heck is there to stop them? A bunch of geriatric feminists and medicated, barren whores? Led by three guys whose alphaness begin and end with sitting around trying to dream up the coolest sounding way of saying a neg?
If you simply extrapolate the current trajectory of Islam vs secularism in Europe, that whole continent will be in Burqas in a century.
In earlier times, things didn’t work that way, because immigrants came because they genuinely appreciated (as in deep down felt that it was an improvement over their own) the culture of their new home, and wanted to take part in it. But nowadays, like any sensible person, all they see is a dystopian wasteland; whose only value is in the dead, accumulated wealth lying about, ready to be looted by whomever happen to be the most populous and aggressive.
Hence, no “integration” of these guys. Heck, in parts of Europe, there are now more “whites” converting to Islam than there are Muslim immigrants and descendants giving up their faith for secularism. And it’s not because the new immigrants are somehow meaner, less appreciative or stupider than previous immigrant waves. But rather because the West no longer have anything other than loot to offer; whereas it earlier offered a genuinely better way of life.
Great article for the most part but it badly needs a copy editor.
Totally, especially because in this sentence:
“Some solid research on effective birth control methods arose late in the 1800’s, but it was against the law to disseminate it.”
He forgot the “(heh)” after “disseminate”.
Nothing really ever changes. Yeah, the form but the principle remains.
excellent article and long overdue for ROK
one small detail…. I’d read previously that the short hair cuts were a throw back from the flu and part of a kind of urban myth that having short hair prevented it’s transference……
it is interesting to compare the end of the cold war… which was a major shift in the social spectrum…. that we have all kinda forgotten about, since no real bloodshed took place….with the end of WW1 and WW2 as well….
huge booms and massive social changes gave way to depression and the collapse of the narcissistic tendencies…
the whole idolization of hip hop and hollywood.. compares well with the glamor of the 20s and 50s…..
the 2008 financial collapse was staved off, but they cannot stave off another one…..
so the Alphas at ROK may yet get their day of reckoning as we watch all the vapid socialite chicks and the college co-eds with useless degrees, handily toting their smart phone and fluttering their eye lashes in night clubs…. plunged into real hardship……
then they will learn how important it is to spread their legs for a good strong man that can provide for them… (if he can be bothered).
But by then it s too late, since good men definitionally do not attempt making whores into wives; instead preferring to simply cull them, to make the resources they would otherwise consume available to more worthy women, and more importantly their offspring.
Yep, there are others on the way, for sure. The Chinese real-estate bubble is even bigger than the one we had here in the 2000’s, and there is nothing that Obama or the Fed can do about it.
I supported you until the last comment. No virtuous woman, or any woman you should respect if you consider yourself a virtuous man, should spread legs for any strong man that can provide for her. Remember, the 20’s broke the traditional family and the role of the motherhood and wife. Ideally she should be married to him first and not have any man before that.. but knowing how run-down women are these days!
Indeed, there is nothing new under the sun.
Do some research into this woman:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois_Long
She was, literally, the real-life “Carrie Bradshaw” generations of women wish they were/could be.
If the “cock carousel” had a specific inventor, it would be Lois Long:
To summarize her lifestyle in her own words: “Tomorrow we may die, so let’s get drunk and make love.”
Good subject for an article, but it needs more sources.
Also, for whomever chooses the photos, the one at the top is of the Andrews Sisters from World War II. Thats definitely not flapper.
The Andrews sisters started in the twenties.
They certainly were popular in the forties, but their careers were launched during the Roaring Twenties.
See the movie “Breezy” by Clint Eastwood from 1973.
The hipster girl with the guitar is not like what they are today… by any means. She was actually happy just to see the ocean… or eat icecreams during a sunny day. Now you buy a bitch a louis vuitton for a thousand bucks and she is still a nagging bitch.unable to present any feminine qualities, probably on psychiatric drugs, turning into consumer zombie every passing year.
Western “culture” has to end. God please let the fukushima spill over to USA and canada and let’s start a new society in southern hemisphere with hemp being primary building material!
Nice article. Supports my belief that, when the economy collapses, so will the Feminist fuckfest. However this time, the collapse will be MUCH worse because Feminism has become so evil.
I fully expect to see:
– Gangs of teenage boys armed with assault rifles destroying major cities.
– Women wearing veils, not because they are forced to by their husbands, but because it’s the only way to avoid getting pulled into a alley and gang raped.