Escovedo 1

Camille Escovedo
Frenzel
11 March 2014
What a Flapper Wants
Zelda Fitzgerald, proclaimed first flapper, by her husband and writer F. Scott
Fitzgerald, spent much of her life trying to express and be recognized for her talents
independently from him
1
. This involved pursuing fame as a ballerina, a novelist, and an artist,
the way a flapper would do what called out to her, and she grieved her failures in these pursuits
as she grieved the cultural death of the flapper, killed by consumerism, in her essay, Eulogy on
the Flapper
2
.
The term flapper was used in the 1920s to describe young women with a penchant for
speakeasies, dancing, fashion, and flings during the Jazz Age, their movement a response to
restrictive social conventions that inhibited women of the Victorian Era
3
. There existed a divide
between the suffragettes of the older generation, victorious in challenging the political norm of
denying women the vote, and the young flappers who appeared to be more concerned with
challenging social norms than political ones and maintaining a scandalous reputation their
feminist elders did not unanimously endorse
4
.
Contrasting with the long-lasting reforms brought about by the Victorian suffragettes,
the flapper movement faded away by the end of the 1920s, largely due to the stock market crash
that preceded the Great Depression
5
. It became too expensive for luxuries and going to jazz clubs
and speakeasies. But, as Fitzgerald writes in Eulogy on the Flapper, the decline of the flapper
began long before the crash when the original flappers style was adopted by school girls, female
clerks, and small-town belles always imitative of the big-town ship girls via the novelty
stores,
6
. In the essay, she recounts how the first flappers shook things up, but always knew this

1
"The First Flapper: Zelda Fitzgerald - Today I Found Out." 2013. 12 Mar. 2014
<http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/11/remarkable-zelda-fitzgerald/>
2
"The First Flapper: Zelda Fitzgerald - Today I Found Out." 2013. 12 Mar. 2014
<http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/11/remarkable-zelda-fitzgerald/>
3
"Flappers in the Roaring Twenties - 20th Century History - About.com." 2004. 12 Mar. 2014
<http://history1900s.about.com/od/1920s/a/flappers.htm>
4
"Feminist Mothers, Flapper Daughters? | The Nation." 2010. 12 Mar. 2014
<http://www.thenation.com/article/155100/feminist-mothers-flapper-daughters>
5
"Flappers in the Roaring Twenties - 20th Century History - About.com." 2004. 12 Mar. 2014
<http://history1900s.about.com/od/1920s/a/flappers.htm>
6
"zep_psi: Eulogy on the Flapper." 2010. 12 Mar. 2014 <http://zep-psi.livejournal.com/168514.html>
Escovedo 2

was rooted in longings they had only recently been able to express in society, and they continued
to fight for women to experience joy in the precarious moment. That exhilaration, the right to be
happy living in the now is what a flapper wants most, thought Zelda Fitzgerald.
After this, according to Zelda Fitzgerald, the message of the legendary flapper becomes
diluted. She believed the movement deteriorated because women began to derive their
empowerment by emulating and outdoing. The empowerment and authenticity of fulfilling ones
repressed desires that made the flappers actions so existential morphed into the pursuit of being
outrageous rather than revolutionary, as the original flappers became vain and complacent with
their accomplishments, and the next generation of flappers valued style over substance. As much
of a tragedy this was to Fitzgerald and many others, in truth, it was only to be expected.
Like Fitzgerald wrote, it had now been done before, and they knew it. This conflict and
loss of meaning and memory between generations invested in feminism and its objectives lives
and thrives today. The defining line between degrading hypersexuality and sexual liberation is
blurred and fought over still, with older generations still clinging to old ways and younger
generations trying to redefine empowerment, in some ways which are radical and others that are
not. For true progress, it is this generations responsibility to not imitate empowerment, but to
forge ones own.