Flapper is a dazzling look at the women who heralded a radical change in American culture and launched the first truly modern decade. The New Woman of the 1920s puffed cigarettes, snuck gin, hiked her hemlines, danced the Charleston, and necked in roadsters. More important, she earned her own keep, controlled her own destiny, and secured liberties that modern women take for granted. Flapper is an inside look at the 1920s. With tales of Coco Chanel, the French orphan who redefined the feminine form; Lois Long, the woman who christened herself “Lipstick” and gave New Yorker readers a thrilling entrée into Manhattan’s extravagant Jazz Age nightlife; three of America’s first celebrities: Clara Bow, Colleen Moore, and Louise Brooks; Dallas-born fashion artist Gordon Conway; Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, whose swift ascent and spectacular fall embodied the glamour and excess of the era; and more, this is the story of America’s first sexual revolution, its first merchants of cool, its first celebrities, and its most sparkling advertisement for the right to pursue happiness. Whisking us from the Alabama country club where Zelda Sayre first caught the eye of F. Scott Fitzgerald to Muncie, Indiana, where would-be flappers begged their mothers for silk stockings, to the Manhattan speakeasies where patrons partied till daybreak, historian Joshua Zeitz brings the 1920s to exhilarating life.

For many young women, the 1920s felt like a promise of liberty. It was a period when they dared to shorten their skirts and shingle their hair, to smoke, drink, take drugs and to claim sexual freedoms. In an era of soaring stock markets, consumer expansion, urbanization and fast travel, women were reimagining both the small detail and the large ambitions of their lives. In Flappers, acclaimed biographer Judith Mackrell follows a group of six women - Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Tallulah Bankhead, Zelda Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker and Tamara de Lempicka - who, between them, exemplified the range and daring of that generation's spirit. For them, the pursuit of experience was not just about dancing the Charleston and wearing fashionable clothes. They made themselves prominent among the artists, icons, and heroines of their age, pursuing experience in ways that their mothers could never have imagined, seeking to define what it was to be young and a woman in an age where the smashing of old certainties had thrown the world wide open. Talented, reckless and wilful, with personalities that transcended their class and background, they re-wrote their destinies in remarkable, entertaining and sometimes tragic ways. And between them they blazed the trail of the New Woman around the world.

In the glorious, boozy party after the first World War, a new being burst defiantly onto the world stage: the so-called flapper. Young, impetuous, and flirtatious, she was an alluring, controversial figure, celebrated in movies, fiction, plays, and the pages of fashion magazines. But, as this book argues, she didn’t appear out of nowhere. This spirited, beautifully illustrated history presents a fresh look at the reality of young women’s experiences in America and Britain from the 1890s to the 1920s, when the “modern” girl emerged. Linda Simon shows us how this modern girl bravely created a culture, a look, and a future of her own. Lost Girls is an illuminating history of the iconic flapper as she evolved from a problem to a temptation, and finally, in the 1920s and beyond, to an aspiration.

Fantagraphics celebrates The Flapper Queens, a gorgeous collection of full-color comic strips. In addition to featuring the more well-known cartoonists of the era, such as Ethel Hays, Nell Brinkley, and Virginia Huget, Eisner award-winning Trina Robbins introduces you to Eleanor Schorer, who started her career in the teens as a flowery art nouveau Nell Brinkley imitator but, by the '20s, was drawing bold and outrageous art deco illustrations; Edith Stevens, who chronicled the fashion trends, hairstyles, and social manners of the '20s and '30s in the pages of The Boston Globe; and Virginia Huget, possibly the flappiest of the Flapper Queens, whose girls, with their angular elbows and knees, seemed to always exist in a euphoric state of Charleston.

 One of the most popular Hollywood child stars of the late 1910s, Virginia Lee Corbin was well known to fans worldwide. With her mother as her manager, Corbin retained her popularity as she grew older. She performed in vaudeville for a couple of years before continuing her film career. Corbin fit well into the flapper mold of the Jazz Age and appeared in many films throughout the 1920s. As she matured, her mother found it ever more difficult to control her. Corbin led a difficult life. After her mother’s suicide attempt, she found that all the money she had earned was gone. Her marriage (at age 18) failed and she was eventually separated from her children. The flapper struggled to remain relevant in the sound era and was trying to make a comeback when she died at 31 in 1942.

This book offers an examination of the Roaring Twenties in the United States, focusing on the vibrant icon of the newly liberated woman—the flapper—that came to embody the Jazz Age. Flappers takes readers back to the time of speakeasies, gangsters, dance bands, and silent film stars, offering a fresh look at the Jazz Age by focusing on the women who came to symbolize it. Flappers captures the full scope of the hedonistic subculture that made the Roaring Twenties roar, a group that reacted to Prohibition and other attempts to impose a stricter morality on the nation. Topics include the transition from silent films to talkies, the arrival of American Jazz as the country's first truly indigenous musical form, the evolution of the United States from a rural to an urban nation, the fashion and slang of the times, and more. It is an exhilarating portrait of a brief outburst of liberation that would last until the Great Depression came crashing down.

Examines the symbols that defined perceptions of women during the late 1910s and 1920s and how they changed women's role in society.