Flappers. Roaring Twenties. Jazz, short hair, alcohol, cigarettes, sexual liberation, short dresses, overturning of Victorian values and expectations for women, youth and glamor and hedonism, etc etcetc. There are a lot of interesting newspaper articles about them from the 1920s; for example, this gem:
All the world’s a stage to-day, and the flapper is its ingenue. She is the demi-dame that’s too old to believe in Santa Claus, hair ribbons, and Louisa May Alcott. She runs from sweet sixteen to twinkling twenty, but that’s all she does run from… Most of ‘em graduate from low heels to high heels and high necks to low ones before they graduate from high school.
They get double meanings a long time before they get double chins, but they still get by with their baby faces… On a ballroom floor the flap is neither handicapped nor shoulderbound. She has more steps than the State Capitol and more stamina than an army mule. From tiara to toes, she’s Terpsichore. She understands men and horses and literature and bridge. And she knows New York from the Aquarium at the Battery to the Zoo in the Bronx.
