Speaking of costumes, here's a headline from the Nov. 1, 1916, Arkansas Gazette:
Grandma and Flapper Dress Alike Now; Girls of 16 and 60! Hard to Tell Them Apart
In the first place, wow, an exclamation mark in a headline. Advertising copy did a fair bit of shrieking and banging in 1916, but the old Gazette didn't make a habit of gasping headlines.
In the second place, there's a "flapper" in that headline, and she's pretty much what we think of when we use the word today: a leggy young thing with bobbed hair and short, sacklike frock.
The flapper is such an icon of the Roaring Twenties that it's easy to assume she arose in that third decade of the 20th century like Venus coalescing in the soft foam of the resounding sea. Only instead of salt water, she came from Prohibition and speakeasies, World War I and its ensuing Lost Generation -- all that jazz.
After all, the Jennifer Aniston of the bob -- actress Louise Brooks -- was still a sophomore in high school in 1922. And Clara Bow, 1927's "It Girl," didn't play her first "horrid little flapper" until 1924.
And yet here is this headline, already clucking about flappers in 1916.
Let's read a bit of the essay, by the once formidable Nixola Greeley-Smith. The granddaughter of newspaperman Horace Greeley, she was a sharp interviewer for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. The Gazette began running her columns in May 1912. Occasionally it botched her byline, calling her "Nixola Greeley-Cmith" or, as over this essay, "Nixola Greenly-Smith."
...
"'High school girls wear their waists too low and their skirts too high. They go to school clad like nymphs in a Greek dance and they paint and powder like Comanches on the warpath. Why? To attract the attention of boys, I suppose. They are boy crazy.'
"While Mrs. B.E. Nichols, a delegate to the State Mothers' Congress, was delivering herself of these views in Denver ... Mrs. Charles W. Stockton, president of the State Federation of Women's Clubs of New York, turned her attention to the problem of the dress of women and girls, and the following list of Don'ts is the result of her cogitations.
"'Don't wear your skirt so short that a person can't tell whether you are sixteen or sixty. Don't spend money on dress which ought to go for good books. Don't wear a silly narrow skirt, so you can't get on a train, or a straw hat in a snowstorm, or a velvet hat in July.'
DON'T WORRY ABOUT GRANDMA AND HER SKIRTS
"Now, I think that if the only way you can tell whether a woman is sixteen or sixty is by looking at the length of her skirts, grandma is entitled to all the doubts she can create. We should not waste our worry on grandma, whether she chooses to add or to omit from her costume.
"The schoolgirl is another matter. Childhood is entitled to protection, even from its own folly, so whatever fault there is to find with the clothes of high school girls should be found with their mothers and not with them. ...
"Mothers say, of course, that they cannot control their daughters. To confess such failure does not alter it or minimize responsibility for it. Some mothers admit that they know it is wrong for schoolgirls to get themselves up like queens of burlesque, but that so many girls do it and so many men admire it that they cannot afford to make wall flowers of their little daughters by enforcing the laws of good taste in their dress.
'"If a girl expects to land a husband,' one mother told me, 'she has to begin looking for him when she is still in school, and what chance has a little girl in a middy suit, with braided hair and a natural color, against girls dressed in silks and made up like Indians?'
"There is one thing to be said for mother and daughter and grandma. It has never been said more completely than by Jules Bois in his early novel The Eternal Doll. 'Woman is the product of her epoch,' declared this distinguished Frenchman. 'Through all the ages she has been what men wanted her to be. And if she is a doll, a toy, a plaything, it is because men have wished her to be so.' ...
"Farmers won't grow eggplant when all the money is in wheat or potatoes, and women won't be simple and natural, wear their own hair, their own complexions and their own figures, so long as the masculine market calls for something else. For most women today must live by pleasing men in one way or another. It is folly to believe that a woman is independent, merely because she does not get married. If she is an artist, she may sell a picture because of a becoming hat; if an actress, land a job because of the neatness of her silk-clad ankles.
"This is not as it should be. And already the most efficient women can go about their work as if they were got up for a hard day's [plowing], if they are foolish enough to forgo the delight of making themselves as beautiful as art and nature will permit. These are only the strong women. The others, whether they are self-supporting or marry, must please men. And this being true, have we not strong reason for believing that the flapper type is most admired by American men and that even grandma must give a more or less successful imitation of her, if she wants to convince people that she is still alive? ...
"Women wear the fashions, but men make them by the women they pursue, and when a man puts on field glasses to look at the Greek nymph painted like a Comanche we are not very much impressed by his indignation, even though he feels it necessary to exclaim from time to time to a brother reformer, 'Take a peek at that painted underdressed creature. Isn't she an abandoned wretch?'"
PRECOCIOUS
Lexicographers David Barnhart and Allan Metcalf chose "flapper" as the word of 1915 in their book America in So Many Words: Words That Have Shaped America, published in 1997. And 1915 is the year that references to "flappers" really begin to pop up in the Gazette archives.
Most are from wire service articles, but the Gus Blass and Pfeifer Brothers stores in Little Rock advertised their bargains in "flapper suits for the growing girl," too.
So there you go. Whatever societal forces created the flapper, they were busy in Arkansas before 1920.
Next week: Big Day Is Here; Who Will It Be?
ActiveStyle on 10/31/2016