In honor of women\u2019s history month, we bring you a reading selection that highlights the upheaval American society experienced in the 1920s as regards gender roles. The media popularized the term \u201cflapper\u201d to describe rebellious young women who rejected conventional notions of proper female behavior, and it became a common descriptor for young women who shortened their skirts, bobbed their hair, danced to jazz music, smoked cigarettes, drank alcohol illegally, embraced their sexuality, or disobeyed their elders.\u00a0As journalist William O. Saunders illustrates, flappers didn\u2019t just challenge gender norms, but also the dynamics of white middle-class family life.<\/p>\n
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\nI am the father of two flappers: trim-legged, scantily dressed, bobbed-haired, hipless, corsetless, amazing young female things, full of pep, full of joy, full of jazz. They have been the despair of me for two or three summers; but if they don\u2019t fly off and marry and quit me before I\u2019m a century old, I\u2019m going to know those girls.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nI used to think I knew my girls. A lot of foolish parents make that same mistake; but it remained for Elizabeth,\u00a0the elder of the two amazing young persons, to open my eyes and show me up in my ignorance.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nFor instance, I thought my girls were different from the average run of wild young things. My own childhood was spent in a righteous, church-going, psalm-singing little country town, where young folk were taught \u201cto be seen and not heard,\u201d and where a game of croquet on Sunday afternoons was an abomination in the sight of the Lord.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nI assume that I am just an average adult and parent. I was fetched up by a modest mother who wore three petticoats and a floor-sweeping skirt, and by a father who kept on his trousers to bathe his torso, and put on his shirt before bathing the rest of him. I never learned from either parent whether I was male or female, or that there was such a division in the human species.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nI came up with some old-fashioned ideas about women and woman\u2019s place in the world. There was nothing frank about the age in which I was brought up. It was not even decent to concede that women were bipeds. . . .\u00a0 Read more<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Want more women\u2019s history materials?\u00a0 Check out these materials from our digital atlas entry on World War I and the 1920s!<\/p>\n
The Changing Role and Status of Women<\/a><\/h3>\n
Courting vs. Dating<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n