First National Flapper Day
Fritzi over at MoviesSilently had a fantastic idea:
I mentioned #NationalFlapperDay. We have days celebrating fast food, pirate talk and assorted pets but what about the spirit of the Roaring Twenties? On November 16, we invite you to join us in indulging in everything that is the cat’s meow.
Could I ever resist that? You bet I couldn’t!
Who is a flapper?
First off, let’s make this straight: who is a flapper?
Meriam-Webster Dictionary: a young woman in the 1920s who dressed and behaved in a way that was considered very modern
Oxford Dictionary: (in the 1920s) a fashionable young woman intent on enjoying herself and flouting conventional standards of behaviour
MacMillan Dictionary: a young woman in the 1920s who had short hair, wore short dresses, and had a lot of fun at parties
But… is it just me, or you find this quite dismissive too?
Let’s make this straight then.
Sorry, Fritzi, I know this doesn’t fit the ‘National’ as you intended, since this is a British take at flapperhood, but this is part of my point. Flappers weren’t just girls having fun, though this is certainly what everyone, especially contemporaries, were make them out to be. Flapperhood was a social phenomenon, smaller than people normally think today (not all girls were flappers in the 1920s, quite the opposite) and still larger than we normally understand (but all girls wanted to be flappers in the 1920s).
The way this small group of young women behaved upset the whole of the Western world and changed the way women and men thought to themselves forever. Not because women acted wild, but because women thought they had every right to act as wild as men and men started to accept that.
Although only a small number of women had the time, the means, the occasion and the money to be a flapper, they managed to change the mental-habit of all women and gave a big shake to the mental-habit of most men.
Where does the name ‘flapper’ come from?
As it looks the case for many terms originated in the 1920s, nobody really knows where the name ‘flapper’ comes from.
The story you’ll find more often reported is this:
B.F. Goodrich Zipper Ad, July 1928
The term flapper originated in Great Britain, where there was a short fad among young women to wear rubber galoshes (an overshoe worn in the rain or snow) left open to flap when they walked. The name stuck, and throughout the United States and Europe flapper was the name given to liberated young women
But I recently came across a different take at it.
The real origin of the word likely comes from a fledgling – a young bird flapping its wings while learning to fly. By the 1890s the term was surfacing in England as a reference to high-spirited teenage girls. The word first appeared in print in the UK in 1903 in a story about college life by Desmond Coke called ‘Sandford of Merton’.
This is a definition that I don’t see very often, but don’t you find it fascinating?
Happy National Flapper Day!
Celebrate #NationalFlapperDay an initiative of @MoviesSilently
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