Flapper once meant a schoolgirl whose plait still swung loose
Long before it described jazz-loving, bob-haired women of the 1920s, flapper was English slang for a teenage girl not yet old enough to pin up her hair. The word wandered through theatre gossip and newspaper columns until war, the vote, cars and Prohibition turned it into a badge of rebellion.
Its roots are murky. One theory ties it to northern English usage for a girl whose plait flaps on her back; another traces it to an older word for a prostitute, used as far back as 1631. By 1908 The Times felt obliged to explain that a flapper was a young lady not yet promoted to long frocks and put-up hair. In 1912 the London impresario John Tiller told The New York Times it meant a girl who had just come out into society. Popular stories about unbuckled galoshes or flapping coats are false etymologies.
The First World War changed its meaning. Mass deaths among young men and the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed 20 to 40 million people, left many feeling life could end at any moment. The war loosened class barriers, American women won the vote on August 26, 1920, and many had taken jobs once reserved for men. Cars offered privacy and freedom of movement, and contempt for Prohibition filled speakeasies, feeding a broader disdain for authority.
Hollywood fixed the image. Selznick's 1920 comedy The Flapper, starring Olive Thomas, was the first American film to show the lifestyle, and Clara Bow, Louise Brooks and Joan Crawford built careers on it. F. Scott Fitzgerald held up Crawford as the finest example. The look travelled: Argentina had its joven moderna, France the garçonne and Japan the moga.
Critics were loud. Labor Secretary James J. Davis attacked cigarette-smoking, cocktail-drinking flippancy in 1922, a Harvard psychologist claimed flappers were a hopeless problem for educators, and Dorothy Parker mocked the fad in verse. Some doctors fretted that boyish styles made women less marriageable, though the short hair and hemlines also signalled blurring gender roles. By 1936 a Times writer filed the word alongside blotto as dated slang.
Source: Flapper
