Flappers: A Guide to an American Subculture

by Kelly Boyer Sagert

Overview

This book offers an examination of the Roaring Twenties in the United States, focusing on the vibrant icon of the newly liberated woman—the flapper—that came to embody the Jazz Age.

Flappers takes readers back to the time of speakeasies, gangsters, dance bands, and silent film stars, offering a fresh look at the Jazz Age by focusing on the women who came to symbolize it.

Flappers captures the full scope of the hedonistic subculture that made the Roaring Twenties roar, a group that reacted to Prohibition and other attempts to impose a stricter morality on the nation. Topics include the transition from silent films to talkies, the arrival of American Jazz as the country's first truly indigenous musical form, the evolution of the United States from a rural to an urban nation, the fashion and slang of the times, and more. It is an exhilarating portrait of a brief outburst of liberation that would last until the Great Depression came crashing down.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780313376900
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	12/21/2009
Series:	Guides to Subcultures and Countercultures
Pages:	146
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Kelly Boyer Sagert is a freelance writer.

Table of Contents

Series Foreword ix

Preface xi

Timeline xiii

Chapter 1 The Decade of the 1920s: The Flapper Era 1

Chapter 2 The First Modern Liberated Woman: The Flapper 11

Chapter 3 F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald: The Flapper Era Personified 23

Chapter 4 From Silent to Talkie: The World of Film 33

Chapter 5 Prohibition in the Flapper Era 43

Chapter 6 Legacy of the Era 53

Biographical Sketches 63

Glossary 105

Primary Documents 115

Selected Bibliography 139

Index 143