The Jazz Age

The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald coined the term "Jazz Age" retrospectively to refer to the decade after World War I and before the stock market crash in 1929, during which Americans embarked upon what he called "the gaudiest spree in history." The Jazz Age is inextricably associated with the wealthy white "flappers" and socialites immortalized in Fitzgerald's fiction. However, the era's soundtrack was largely African American, facilitating what Ann Douglas has described as a "racially mixed social scene" without precedent in the United States. Postwar U.S. supremacy and a general disillusion with politics provided the economic base and social context of the Jazz Age. In his 1931 essay, "Echoes of the Jazz Age," Fitzgerald referred to "a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure," a rather glib exaggeration, as 71 percent of American families lived below the poverty line during the Roaring Twenties. Nevertheless, a young white elite put this pleasure principle into practice by embracing jazz. As the historian Lawrence Levine observed, many whites identified this black music as libidinal and "primitive," the liberating antithesis of main-stream, middle-class conventions. White New Yorkers went "slumming" at jazz clubs in Harlem. Boosted by the emergence of radio and the gramophone, black singers like Bessie Smith and Clara Smith became stars. The motion picture The Jazz Singer (1927) brought the music to the big screen in the first-ever "talkie," although the eponymous hero was the white performer Al Jolson in blackface.

The Jazz Age of the Roaring Twenties put the spotlight on a new sound standing firmly on center-stage.

With the rise of this new musical form came a common thread that runs throughout the 1920s:innovation and energy.

The Role of Jazz In 1920s Culture

As with fashion and the characters of the 1920s, the music has often been romanticized and mythologized. It's hard to tell fact from fiction.

The fact is the jazz lifestyle was appealing to many. Aloof, hard-edged, passionate and distinctly urban, the jazz musician character appealed to many young white girls and boys hoping to escape the drudgery of rural America.

Chicago and New York became the hotbeds of this new music. Jazz quartets were forming all over the country as young boys gathered to listen to new records on windup Victrolas.

It was written that everything "in fashion would, sooner or later, be defined as jazz." Jazz was more than a musical style, it was style.

The Age of Jazz didn't only occur in the cities. It was as much or more a phenomenon in the small towns where girls and boys smoked, drank, drove fast, and "petted" in the back seats of motorcars.

The early 1920s were prime years of flappers; despised by "proper" Middle America, but adored by the major newspapers and magazines of the day.

Taking the music out of the equation, you can make a good argument "The Jazz Age" was as much a slick marketing campaign as it was a social revolution.

Girls were spending hundreds of dollars the get the right "flapper" look (in the 1920s this was worth upwards of $1000).

Make no mistake, there was a revolution happening, both in the music world and with the "New Woman" of The Jazz Age.

You just had to look in the right places.

The Mould of "The New Woman"

Thanks in large part to young woman like Zelda Sayre (F. Scott Fitzgerald's young bride), Louise Brooks and Lois Long, women were becoming a major force to be reckoned with in popular culture of the 1920s.

Smart, witty, brash, and eloquent, these women not only drank and partied just as hard as the men, they also chronicled their experiences as flappers during the Roaring Twenties..

Long was a major reporter for New York's newest magazine, "The New Yorker". She journaled here exploits and adventures as Manhattan's most popular socialite. She was the Carrie Bradshaw of the 1920s, and fleshed out what it meant to experience The Jazz Age.

Joshua Zietz writes, "Flapperdom was every bit as much an expression of class aspirations as it was a statement of personal freedom.

FLAPPERS

No decade in recent history has seen as much change in the status and style of women as the 1920s, sometimes called the Roaring Twenties or the Era of Wonderful Nonsense. Trendy young women of the 1920s were nicknamed flappers, and the flapper became the image that represented the tremendous change in women's lives and attitudes during that period.

During the early part of the twentieth century women in countries from Australia to Norway were gaining the right to vote, and more and more women were able to support themselves by working at jobs. In addition to women's new freedoms, by the 1920s there were automobiles to drive, films to see, and jazz music to dance to, and modern young women wanted to join in the fun. Young women were no longer content to spend hours binding themselves into burdensome layers of clothing or styling long masses of hair.

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. Flappers were bold, confident, and sexy. They tried new fad diets in an effort to achieve a fashionable thinness, because new fashions required slim figures, flat chests, and slim hips. The flapper dress was boxy and hung straight from shoulder to knee, with no waistline, allowing much more freedom of movement than women's fashions before the 1920s. While it did not show breasts or hips, it did show a lot of leg, and the just-below-the-knee length horrified many of the older generation. French fashion designer Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel (1883–1971) did much to popularize the new freedom of the flapper look.

Flappers also shocked conservatives by cutting their hair short and wearing makeup. Before the 1920s long hair was the mark of a respectable lady, but flappers had no time for elaborate hairdos. They cut, or bobbed, their hair just below the ears and curled it in dozens of tiny spit curls with a new invention called a bobby pin. Some also used electric curling irons to create small waves called "marcels," named after Marcel Grateau (1852–1936), the French hair stylist who invented them. Cosmetics had long been associated with prostitutes and actresses, but flappers considered it glamorous to wear dark red lipstick, lots of rouge, and thick black lines around their eyes, sometimes made with the burned end of a matchstick. New cosmetics companies including Maybelline and Coty began manufacturing products to help women achieve the new look. For the first time, women began to carry cosmetics with them in handbags wherever they went.

One of the most famous flappers was silent film star Clara Bow (1905–1965). Sometimes called the "It" girl, Bow was thought to have "it," a quality of open sexuality, innocence, and fun that was the very definition of the flapper. Many women imitated Bow's look by drawing a bow shape on their lips, rimming their eyes in black, and curling their hair onto their cheeks.

Despite the youthful enthusiasm for flapper style, some people felt threatened by it. When hemlines began to rise, several states made laws charging fines to women wearing skirts with hemlines more than three inches above the ankle, and many employers fired women who bobbed their hair. However, in the excitement and gaiety that followed the end of World War I in 1918, the movement toward a freer fashion could not be stopped by those who valued the old ways. It took the stock market crash of 1929 to bring the era of the flapper to a sudden end. Almost overnight, the arrival of an economic depression brought a serious tone to society. Women's hemlines dropped again, and the carefree age of the flapper was over.

To fully imagine, who Clara Bow was, watch this video: