Stereotypes In Dorothy Parker's The Playful Flappers

Flappers were known as an “exotic breed of young women” that were stereotyped as slender, chic, strong-willed, and extreme partygoers. The behaviors associated with the flapper include smoking, heavily, drinking, and sexually provocative. According to Dorothy Parker in her poem “The Playful Flapper”, flappers were just flirtatious, opinionated, outrageous women. Although they were seen as such, these stereotypes given to flappers were not true and based on false conclusions. For example many of those who condemned the flapper culture believed that they were a disgrace to society, because they believed flapper had a tendency of claiming their independence with the refusal of marriage and child rearing. Many people characterized flappers into the same group and believed that

they were women with no brains, and this allowed others to think that women were incapable of certain rights men have, but those who look unfavorably upon the flappers did not understand the culture and why more and more women latched onto the flapper lifestyle. Although many critics of the flapper culture believe that flappers was such a reaction toward cosmopolitan trends, flappers were expressing their reaction towards “the rise of women’s rights, the decline of conservative morality, and the explosion of urban culture and nightlife combined”, that derived from political and social changes in the United Sates during WWI.
As men began enlisting for WWI in order to protect there families, and country, job vacancy increased at a rapid rate.

The lack of the presence of men during WWI, indirectly gave women rights that would later become one of many roots that created the flapper. Women were used as replacements and seen as inadequate replacements by their employers. According to Kaye-Smith who wrote about such women, in order “’to prove herself man’s equal, as she always has been, she has paid him unnecessary compliment of imitation, and she will never establish herself in popular opinion as his equal until she realizes that her equality lies in difference’”. But these women were not imitating men, or trying to prove that she is as equally qualified as men, in fact they were sustaining the country and came to a realization that they can be successfully independent without men. And in 1920 nineteenth amendment was added to the American Constitution giving women the right to vote. The variety of employment options as well as the nineteenth amendment “encouraged women to aggressively pursue their goals and become more active in politics and society.” allowing the flapper to emerge as a new form of liberated

women.