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.

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.

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.

Originally published: Great Britain: Macmillan, 2013.

Entertaining, highly readable book pulses with the vernacular of young Americans from the end of the 19th century to the present. Alphabetical listings for each decade, plus fascinating sidebars about language and culture.

Is youth culture coming to an end? In this exciting new read, Marcel Danesi offers a compelling account of how youth culture emerged and evolved in North America over the course of the twentieth century and why it may be disappearing. Tracing the origins of youth culture in the Roaring Twenties through its evolution from the rock and roll rebels of the 1950s to the counterculture hippies of the 1960s, the punk and disco subcultures of the 1970s, and the rap movement of the 1990s, From Flappers to Rappers demonstrates how the musical genres, lifestyles, ideologies, and social movements that characterized the different eras of youth culture have radically reshaped our world. In engaging and accessible prose, Danesi makes the argument that the current fragmented environment of the Internet cannot sustain a united community of youths. He analyzes how new technology, which previously helped to entrench youth movements in society, is now ironically bringing about the demise of youth culture as we know it. Brimming with thought-provoking examples and accompanied by a student workbook, From Flappers to Rappers will be indispensable for students of sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and history, as well as for anyone interested in youth and popular culture.