Reviews for Flapper : a madcap story of sex, style, celebrity, and the women who made America modern
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
If the United States became modern in the decade after the First World War, a popular symbol of that modernity is the flapper, a scantily clad, frivolous young woman whose newfound freedom from restrictive clothing represented a way of life free of Victorian social strictures. Zeitz (American History/Cambridge Univ.), a contributing editor to American Heritage magazine, has undertaken to chronicle the rise and fall of this icon of modernity through the lives of those who exemplified her and those who promoted her. The author devotes considerable space to the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who is variously credited with inventing her, discovering her and/or exploiting her, as well as to that of his wife Zelda. Also sketched in considerable detail are the lives of the women who portrayed her on the silver screen—Colleen Moore, Clara Bow and Louise Brooks—those who wrote about her—New Yorker columnist Lois Long, among them—and those who drew her—fashion artist Gordon Conway and cartoonist John Held. Also profiled are the fashion designer Coco Chanel, whose designs defined her slender silhouette, and Bruce Barton and Edward Bernays, who used her image to promote the sale of consumer goods. The result is a work that feels unduly padded, stuffed full of extraneous facts. These certainly provide color, but it is not clear what Hemingway's jealousy of Fitzgerald, the fact that Louise Brooks claimed to have slept with Greta Garbo or that Lois Long typed her columns stripped to her slip have to do with the subject. Zeitz does create a picture of a United States undergoing a sexual revolution and experiencing urbanization, an expanding consumer culture and a booming economy, but he burdens it with an excess of irrelevant particulars. Copyright ŠKirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
This lively history looks at the Jazz Age through its greatest symbol, the flapper. A far cry from the staid Victorian angel of the house, flappers wore their hair short, dared to show their legs, drank, smoked, and cavorted with young men. Alhough he didn't invent the flapper as many suppose, F. Scott Fitzgerald did bring the modern woman into the public eye in his debut novel, This Side of Paradise. Zeitz explores the lives of the women who have come to personify the flapper ideal: Zelda Sayre, the southern belle who married Fitzgerald and became his muse; Lois Long, the sharp-tongued New Yorker columnist whose nightlife was often the subject of her writing; Coco Chanel, the elegant designer who carefully crafted her own backstory; and the actresses Colleen Moore, Clara Bow, and Louise Brooks, who brought the flapper to the silver screen only to be left in the dust when the following decade ushered in a less sexually confident feminine ideal. Zeitz's energetic writing does his subject justice, bringing to life the wild coed parties; the colorful, glitzy fashion; and the general energy and enthusiasm with which the decade embraced modernity. An essential exploration of the women Zeitz deems the first thoroughly modern Americans. --Kristine Huntley Copyright 2006 Booklist
Publishers Weekly
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This is an entertaining, well-researched and charmingly illustrated dissection of the 1920s flapper, who flouted conventions and epitomized the naughtiness of the Jazz Age as she "bobbed her hair, smoked cigarettes, drank gin, sported short skirts, and passed her evenings in steamy jazz clubs." Cambridge historian Zeitz identifies F. Scott Fitzgerald as "the premier analyst," and his muse and wife, Zelda, "the prototype" of the American flapper. Others who invented aspects of the flapper mystique were New Yorker writer Lois Long, who gave readers a vicarious peek into the humorous late-night adventures of the New Woman; designer Coco Chanel, whose androgynous fashions redefined feminine sexuality as they blurred the line between men's and women's roles in society; fashion artist Gordon Conway, whose willowy and aloof flappers were seen by millions of American and European magazine readers; and Clara Bow, who breathed life into the flapper on the silver screen. The Klan, Zeitz relates, denounced flappers as evils of the modern age, and advertisers exploited the social anxieties of would-be flappers by appealing to the conformist at the heart of this controversial figure. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Library Journal
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Zeitz (American history, Univ. of Cambridge) combines previous scholarship and primary sources to study the cultural history of American women in the 1920s. The title of the book is somewhat misleading as it is not about "flappers" so much as the people who helped create and promote the image of the flapper, that young woman with bobbed hair and cloche hat who was fond of cigarettes, jazz, the Charleston, and skimpy dresses. Zeitz examines the roles played by writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, fashion designer Coco Chanel, various advertising specialists, and film actresses Clara Bow and Louise Brooks in developing and promoting the image of the modern American woman who was embodied by the flapper. Zeitz expands on the scholarship about women as consumers just after the 1920s that was previously undertaken by Frederick Lewis Allen in Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s and Kathy Peiss in Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. This enjoyable and readable book has a target audience of the general public and undergraduates and is recommended for both.-Diane Fulkerson, Univ. of West Georgia Lib., Carrollton (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
