Unearthed by a team of underpaid urban anthropologists digging all hours in the skankiest and most vile of magazine repositories was this single page of feminine poesy representative of an obscure, forgotten genre of Twentieth Century prosody that celebrated a brash cast of woman that was once known as a Flapper.
Alas, the name of the poet has been lost to time.
In the early Twenties there were a good many social changes which men had to struggle to understand; among them was the Modern Woman. The Italian novelist and lexicographer Alfredo Panzini (1863 - 1939) attempted to do just that for the editors of Vanity Fair.
"'Don't expect us', she says to you, disconsolate male, 'don't expect us to be like the old-fashioned girls who went to church, and did the laundry, and looked up to their husbands as to their God.'" More juvenile flapper verses revealing that the flapper is as old as history itself - and far more meddlesome than her male counterpart. Click here to read a FLAPPER MAGAZINE review of an anti-flapper movie.
Click here to read an article about the demise of a popular 1940s hairstyle.
A Victorian father embraced the spirit of the Flapper rebellion, welcomed it into his house and testified that it made his daughters better and their family bonds stronger. A collection of low opinions concerning the Flapper and her confederates, gathered from numerous clerical magazines throughout the fruited plane:
"There is a great deal of frank talk among them that in many cases smacks of boldness. One hears it said that the girls are actually tempting the boys more than the boys do the girls, by their dress and conversation..."
"Will Paris succeed in imposing long skirts on the flappers of America?" "Not if most of them have their way! When Paris started the short skirt fad and America eagerly aped it, the dressmakers figured that it would probably run its course and then die a sudden death. But no! For American flappers may be fickle but they know a good thing when they see it. And they intend to hang on to it."
Click here to read about another icon of the Twenties: Rudolph Valentino.
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