Joshua Zeitz's 'Flapper'

Joshua Zeitz, author of “Flapper”, did a great job detailing how life was in the early 20th century. The time of the flapper was plagued with an increase and redefinition in sexuality, drinking, and fashion. These new innovations during the Jazz Age is what shaped the future for the women of America. It led them experience independence, individuality, and rebellion. Every aspect of life was affected, from the style of young woman’s hair to the normality of dating. The young women of 1922 was starkly different than the ladies a few years her senior. The flapper woman reinvented what sexuality was. She blew through the social standards of how young women should act, she embarrassed her mother, and she danced in unimaginable ways with storms

Young ladies weren't acting like ladies anymore. Girls were dating men much older than them, sometimes multiple men at once. They were disobeying their mothers and fathers wishes of calming down, and acting like a respected Victorian lady. Breaking rules had become the new trend. In the book, Zelda is said to sneak around and sometimes sneak out of the house to “join Montgomery’s most edible bachelors for a few hours of necking, petting, and drinking in secluded backseat venues,” (Zeitz, p.14). Zelda and many women like her indulged in the new age of dating. Thanks to the mass production of automobiles, the traditional form of Victorian Age style courtship withered away. What used to be girls inviting the man, setting the time, and picking the limits of the date, that usually included spending majority of it in the family room of the estate, became the man whisking away his lady into the private depths of the evening in his automobile. Disapproving old style parents named the car the “devil’s wagon” (Zeitz p.23). One old fashioner went as far to say, “There were two types of girls, those who would ride with you in your automobile at night and the nice girls who

Two things that were unheard of for a young woman of class to take part in. Zelda was often seen at the soda fountain in town where “she alternated between double banana splits (innocuous) and “dopes” (not so innocuous), a combination of Coca-Cola and aromatic spirits,” (Zeitz p.15). Zelda thoroughly enjoyed giving her classmates ands peers a show at all times. She “rode behind her admirers…on their motorcycles with her arms around them, raised her hemlines to the knee, bobbed her hair, smoked, tippled, and kissed the boys goodbye,” (Zeitz p.12). Girls her age hardly smoked and got tippled (drunk), especially never in the presence of others. A couple years into Zelda’s life she married F. Scott Fitzgerald. Their marriage can be characterized as a stage show full of drunken debauchery and debt. Majority of their actions were done in hopes of making their friends and party goers laugh while drinking whiskey and gin from tumblers until all hours of the night. Many thought that Zelda wasn’t wife material, but to Scott, she was everything. Her wild, sexual, tipsy ways appalled many, but she loved nothing more than to be the center of