The 1920s were corset-free. Victorian remnants were thrown aside as modernism celebrated ‘the new.’ Cole Porter got it right when he wrote, “In olden days,/ a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking./ But now, God knows, anything goes!”
The ratification of Suffrage in 1920 launched the new decade with an exclamation point. Times had changed, and women embraced freedom from a past that was as belittling as their garments had been. Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald tagged the decade “the Jazz Age,” and women flung themselves into an exhilarating and untraveled future of possibilities.

The Twenties saw modern America flourish. Women moved to the cities for
newly-created jobs—department stores beckoned!—and cars, planes, radio, and moving pictures transformed the pace of everyday life. Mass media gave women the sights and sounds of ‘the new.’ Magazines and newspapers
burgeoned, giving the advertising industry a vast new stage to push
consumerism. Women could pick up a magazine and view ads promoting the latest fashion. Where were the hemlines this season? How high are heels? Cosmetics surged in popularity. Once sneered at as worn only by prostitutes, cosmetics in the Teens and Twenties became a necessity for the modern woman. Elizabeth Arden was one of the industry’s pioneers. She opened her first salon in New York in 1910, and established red lipstick as an iconic symbol for Suffragettes to wear while marching.

Moving pictures fueled the modern look by projecting larger-than-life images on the silver screen. Women copied screen stars ‘looks’– Clara Bow’s “bee-stung lips” and Louise Brooks’ bobbed hair (right) became national rages.
Hollywood failed to accept the enormous talent of Black performer Josephine Baker. She had appeared on Broadway as one of the chorines in Shuffle Along (1921), but little else happened. She left for Paris in 1925 and became an icon of the Jazz Age and beyond. One of her most famous costumes was for the 1927 Paris Revue, where she wore a brief skirt of artificial bananas and a necklace. Parisians loved her, and enjoyed watching her parade around the city with her pet cheetah, Chiquita.

One of the most notorious women of Flapperdom was Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and the model for many of his female heroines, like Daisy in The Great Gatsby (1925). Renowned as a devil-may-care partier, Zelda used her fame to write articles and short stories for magazines, as well as one novel, Save Me the Waltz (1932). As it turned out, Zelda’s diaries also furnished Scott with much ballast for his fiction. We now know that he drew extensively from her diaries, which she filled with evocative descriptions about characters and atmosphere—and which he failed to credit in his lifetime.

Flappers made headlines, but they didn’t own the decade. Remarkable women in the arts were emerging in their own right and creating lasting reputations. In 1920, Edith Wharton became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Age of Innocence. Known for her depictions of the Gilded Age and its transition to the Twentieth Century, Wharton earned her reputation a generation earlier with such works as The House of Mirth (1905). Independently wealthy, Wharton was able to travel and write as she wished.

Few women were born to such wealth, but economic independence was
essential for any woman to forge her own life, and the Twenties offered more possibilities than ever before. Georgia O’Keeffe is a prime example of an artist who found her way. Born on a Wisconsin farm, she left as soon as possible, making her way to New York to study at the Art Students League. She embraced abstract art, and her early work caught the eye of Alfred Stieglitz. He showed her art at his 291 Gallery, including “Red and Orange Streak/Streak” (1919).

She married Stieglitz in 1924, but objected to his sexist approach to her art. Stieglitz was caught up in the fad for Freudianism, and liked showing her art by photographing her nude in front of it. In the mid-1920s, O’Keefe shifted from abstraction to painting more recognizable forms, such as “Radiator Bldg.—Night, NY.” (1927) In 1929, she moved to New Mexico, where her art was transformed by the desert landscape she adored—and which Stieglitz was never invited to visit.

Artist/saloniste Neysa McMein also epitomized women’s rise to independence in the Twenties. A successful commercial artist, she painted cover illustrations for The Saturday Evening Post and McCall’s. She became famous for hosting extravagant parties in her 57th Street apartment/studio. Neysa’s salon was where the Algonquin Round Table went after lunch, and often stayed for dinner.

The heyday of her salon (1920-1926) coincided with the years the Round Table flourished. Everyone-who-was-anyone could be found at one of her gatherings—Noel Coward, Irving Berlin, Charlie Chaplin. George Gershwin performed “Rhapsody in Blue” on Neysa’s grand piano before premiering it at Town Hall. It was where young actress Helen Hayes met her future husband, playwright Charles MacArthur. The Round Table was always the centerpiece, notably led by Alec Woollcott and Dorothy Parker. Neysa’s denizens were the perfect foil for Parker’s wit, which she insisted had more merit than mere “wisecracking”: “Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.” Neysa also had something Parker et al. appreciated–a bathtub full of gin.

What Prohibition?

One magazine asserted that “Neysa had the nearest thing to a salon this
country has ever seen….She might be in a (painter’s) smock and serve bad
port, but everyone came and everyone loved it.” Her biographer, Brian
Gallagher, suggested that her genius as a hostess was that she didn’t preside: whoever showed up would find Neysa covered in pastel dust and moving from her easel to greet them, would offer a drink and then point them to whatever group was making merry. She then returned to her easel. Her artistic world mixed literary wit and the theater with a cosmopolitan spirit that would characterize the new magazine many of her salon friends would create.

Founded in 1925, The New Yorker prided itself on “gaiety, wit and satire….It
will hate bunk.” Women gave the decade its defining character—and characters. Like magazines and movies, the music of the Twenties captured their spirit, from novelty songs like “Yes, We Have No Bananas” and “Makin’ Whoopee” to such classics as George and Ira Gershwin’s “Oh, Lady Be Good” (original playbill, right). But the decade had a serious side as well, as women grabbed new opportunities to achieve economic independence—even after the market crashed in 1929. A Rodgers and Hart song in 1931, “Ten Cents a Dance,” conveyed one woman’s determination, telling her story as a ‘taxi dancer’ in the Palace Ballroom: “Fighters and sailors and bowlegged tailors/can pay for their ticket and rent me!”

Strapping themselves in corsets was unthinkable to women like the ‘taxi
dancer’ who wanted a better life. Instead of ‘whoopee,’ women’s new rallying cry was persistence.

By Amy Henderson, Associate Editor