Short Stuff: Flappers

Stuff You Should Know

This episode of Short Stuff explores the cultural phenomenon of flappers in the 1920s, examining how they challenged traditional gender role

Key takeaways

• Flappers emerged as a direct rejection of Victorian-era norms, embracing independence, modernity, and rebellion against societal expectations.
• World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic accelerated shifts in gender roles by necessitating women's participation in the workforce.

Main topics

• The rise of the flapper in the 1920s
• Cultural shifts post-World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic

Notable quotes

"They're not going to follow these standards and traditions and moral codes that are handed down generation after generation."

Conclusion

The flapper movement represented a brief but transformative period in

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Poynter, Chair of Women's Health and Gynecology at the Adria Health Institute in New York City. I'll be talking to top researchers and clinicians and bringing vital information about midlife women's health directly to you. 100 Speaker 4 (0:20) % of women go through menopause. Speaker 3 (0:22) Even if it's natural, why should we suffer through it? Listen to Decoding Women's Health with Dr. Elizabeth Poynter on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 6 (0:34) On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon. Speaker 8 (0:37) People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Little Richard. Speaker 6 (0:40) And we pull apart the story behind the image, discovering forgotten interviews that change exactly how we see these giants of our culture. Speaker 8 (0:48) We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes. Speaker 6 (0:52) I'm Emmanuel Jochi. I'm Kai Wright. And this is Big Lives. Listen Speaker 8 (0:56) to Big Lives on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 5 (1:08) Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here doing the Charleston on Dave's behalf, and this is Stuff You Should Know Short Stuff. Let's go now. Speaker 1 (1:19) All right. The year is 1915, everybody, and the word flapper is about to be introduced to the world by way of H.L. Minkin, a writer who wrote a, I guess an essay called The Flapper for the literary magazine. The smart set. What Speaker 5 (1:37) a great mag. Speaker 1 (1:38) Yeah. Speaker 5 (1:39) By the way, we should say that Private Eye is not a rag over in the UK. So sorry, everybody. I'm going to go ahead and assume the smart set wasn't either. But in this article or essay, Mencken is using a term that's already been established. Flapper. It was, I think, British slang for a young girl, right? He's saying, no, no, no. We need to get more specific. There is a young girl that's emerging. They're not here yet, but I can see them coming out of the fabric of culture. And they are not going to follow these standards and traditions and moral codes that are handed down generation after generation. There's this new thing called media that is coming up, and that's what's going to influence them. And they're going to be total trailblazers. And he was right. Speaker 1 (2:27) Yeah. So the flapper would come along and kick what was known as the Gibson girl to the curb. The Gibson Girl during the 1910s was created and popularized from an illustrator named Charles Dana Gibson. And this was like if you think of the Edwardian sort of corset wearing, updo hair wearing, choker, you know, like dress that goes, a skirt that goes all the way to the past the ankle and like a choker up to under the chin. That's the Gibson Girl look. And the flapper. came along and said, no, no, no, no, we want to have more fun than that. Speaker 5 (3:04) They did. And they did. And it took the death of tens of millions of people to get them there. Because World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic were a one-two punch that killed a lot of people around the world. And in doing so, both of those things adjusted gender norms to the extent that all of a sudden... Like the world couldn't afford to just keep women off to the side any longer. They were needed more than