Hwo Did Makeup Empower Women In The 1920s?

No cultural symbol of the 1920s is more than recognizable than the flapper. A young woman with a short "bob" hairstyle, cigarette dangling from her painted lips, dancing to a live jazz band. Flappers romped through the Roaring Twenties, enjoying the new freedoms ushered in past the end of the First World War and the dawn of a new era of prosperity, urbanism and consumerism.

The decade kicked off with passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave white women the vote. Women also joined the workforce in increasing numbers, participated actively in the nation'due south new mass consumer civilisation, and enjoyed more freedom in their personal lives. Despite the heady freedoms embodied by the flapper, existent liberation and equality for women remained elusive in the 1920s, and it would exist left to later generations of women to fully benefit from the social changes the decade set in movement.

The exact origins of the word 'flapper' remain unknown.
While the exact origin of the term "flapper" is unknown, it is assumed to take originated in Uk before World War I, when it was used to describe gawky immature teenage girls. After the war, the word would get synonymous with the new breed of 1920s women who bobbed their pilus to a higher place their ears, wore skirts that skimmed their knees, smoked cigarettes and drank alcohol while dancing in jazz clubs, e'er surrounded past admiring male person suitors.

Two flapper women and their dates having a smoke. (Credit: Kirn Vintage Stock/Corbis via Getty Images) — 2 flapper women and their dates having a fume. (Credit: Kirn Vintage Stock/Corbis via Getty Images)

Flappers were divers past how they dressed, danced and talked.
Every bit Joshua One thousand. Zeitz writes in Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity and the Women Who Made America Modern, flapper fashion wouldn't take been complete without the creeping hemline, which by 1925 or 1936 reached a shocking height of 14 inches in a higher place the ground. Sheer stockings, sometimes even rolled below the knees, completed the scandalous await.

Flappers wore their skirts shorter and so they could show off their legs and ankles—simply also and so they could trip the light fantastic toe. They particularly loved the Charleston, a 1920s dance craze involving waving arms and fast-moving feet that had been pioneered past African Americans, start in the South and after in Harlem.

Dancing proved challenging in traditional women'due south way, not just with long dresses, but besides traditional corsets that tightly bound a woman's midsection and accentuated her waist. Effectually 1923, French designer Coco Chanel introduced what became known as the "garçonne expect," featuring not just high hemlines simply dropped or nonexistent waistlines and straight, sleeveless tops. With lighter and more flexible undergarments that created a straight, slim silhouette, this new design allowed women to dance freely.

Information technology wasn't just their manner that made flappers; It was also their behavior and attitude. Flappers were young, fast-moving, fast-talking, reckless and unfazed past previous social conventions or taboos. They smoked cigarettes, drank alcohol, rode in and drove cars and kissed and "petted" with dissimilar men.

Women motility to cities and into the workforce, only stayed in traditional 'women'south roles.'
The flapper was built-in out of a growing landscape in America. By 1920, for the starting time time in the nation'south history, more than Americans (51 pct) were living in cities rather than in rural areas. As part of the nation's urbanization and economical growth, more and more women were entering the workforce. By 1929, more than than a quarter of all women, and more one-half of unmarried women, were gainfully employed.

For the most part, however, the increase of working women didn't represent a challenge to traditional gender roles. Nearly a third of working women in the 1920s were domestic servants, while the rest were clerical workers, manufacturing plant workers, shop clerks and other "feminized" professions. "Women are working, simply they're working in what are chosen 'women's jobs,'" says Lynn Dumenil, professor emerita of history at Occidental College and author of The Second Line of Defence force: American Women and Globe War I.

Even women who blazed a trail in politics faced barriers due to their gender: Most female officeholders worked primarily on what were seen equally "women's issues," preventing them from acquiring also much power within their political parties. Information technology was progress though, with a handful of women would be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (none to the Senate), and many more served at the state and local levels.

Gyre to Continue

Not just were women hitting a glass ceiling with task fields, workplace bigotry and wage inequality also ran rampant throughout the '20s. As Gail Collins writes in her volume America's Women, the average weekly wage for men in 1927 was $29.35, compared to simply $17.34 for women.

While their wages were non high, women joined the new mass consumer culture.
Their wages might not have matched that of their male counterparts, but working women used their purchasing power to join the nation's new mass consumer culture. "The nature of domestic life changes for urban women, certainly, in the '20s," Dumenil says. By 1927, nearly two-thirds of American homes would take electricity, and new consumer appurtenances like the washing machine, refrigerator and vacuum cleaner were revolutionizing housework and abode life. Women were the major target audition for many of the new products, including household appliances, habiliment and cosmetics.

The rise of the automobile contributed to the sense of liberty and possibility that suffused the Roaring Twenties. "The machine is cardinal to Americans' lives in the 1920s, beyond the board," Dumenil explains. "Not everyone tin can afford 1, but consumer credit also expands in the '20s," leading to a new generation of American debtors. Meanwhile, the data revolution brought near past the emergence of the radio allowed a newly vibrant, youth-centered, urban civilization to spread across the United States.

The flapper lifestyle as well affected marriages and sexuality.
Housework wasn't the only factor changing for women on the home front. "The nature of spousal relationship starts to modify," Dumenil explains. "There's more of a sense, not of equality, merely more than of companionship betwixt men and women in union. The supposition well-nigh women'south sexuality changes." Nascence command was becoming more widely available, at least for more than privileged women, which helped limit family size and immune women the freedom to explore their sexuality without facing the consequences of unwanted pregnancies.

"At least for some women, at that place's more freedom in their personal lives [in the 1920s]," Dumenil says. "A trivial less restriction. And it's not just nigh sex activity, although that's part of information technology, simply wear, dancing, the social world and the similar."

This liberty had limits, however, and spousal relationship always remained the ultimate goal. As Collins writes, simply about x percent of women in the 1920s kept their jobs after union, most of them working-grade women whose family needed their paycheck.

Dumenil also points that the the fear of one's reputation still worried flappers. "There's a sense that you take to exist actually careful nigh your sexual activity, for fear that you'll lose your reputation and won't get married....And so the flapper's wildness is e'er, I would say, independent by that."

Zelda Fitzgerald and the stop of the Roaring Twenties.
Arguably the well-nigh famous flapper of all was Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, who, before meeting and marrying the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, spent her nights whirling around country guild dances (and sneaking out to drink and "neck") with whatever number of young Alabama gentlemen. After their marriage in 1920, the difficult-partying couple lived the ultimate Roaring Twenties lifestyle in both New York City and French republic. Though Zelda was an creative person, a dancer and a writer herself, she would be best known as the muse inspiring her hubby's bright stories of life in the Jazz Age, which are oft credited with creating the enduring image of the flapper. Past the late '20s, still, Scott's drinking and Zelda'due south mental illness drove them autonomously. In 1930, Zelda had a nervous breakdown, and she would spend the rest of her life in sanatoriums.

In some means, Zelda's turn down paralleled that of the flapper image she embodied. The stock marketplace crash of October 1929 effectively marked the finish of the Roaring Twenties, an era F. Scott Fitzgerald would after phone call "the most expensive orgy in history." By the onset of the Great Low, Hollywood and the mass media had moved on from the flappers, and in the 1930s women's fashion would revert to more than traditional styles, with accentuated waists and longer hemlines.

The spirit of the flappers lives on.
Some changes that occurred in the 1920s endured. Though the Low wiped out much of America's prosperity and consumer confidence, the nation'south mass consumer culture would eventually re-sally, stronger than e'er.

In the decades to come, more and more women would pursue higher education and enter political life every bit activists, lobbyists or lawmakers. The transformation of sexual mores and family unit life that occurred in the 1920s also persisted. "Changes in the family, the movement toward smaller families, birth control, less restraints in private life," Dumenil says—these change were "permanent."

Source: https://www.history.com/news/flappers-roaring-20s-women-empowerment

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