Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation

By Judith Mackrell

For many young women, the 1920s felt like a promise of liberty. It was a period when they dared to shorten their skirts and shingle their hair, to smoke, drink, take drugs and to claim sexual freedoms. In an era of soaring stock markets, consumer expansion, urbanization and fast travel, women were reimagining both the small detail and the large ambitions of their lives.

In Flappers, acclaimed biographer Judith Mackrell follows a group of six women - Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Tallulah Bankhead, Zelda Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker and Tamara de Lempicka - who, between them, exemplified the range and daring of that generation's spirit. For them, the pursuit of experience was not just about dancing the Charleston and wearing fashionable clothes. They made themselves prominent among the artists, icons, and heroines of their age, pursuing experience in ways that their mothers could never have imagined, seeking to define what it was to be young and a woman in an age where the smashing of old certainties had thrown the world wide open.

Talented, reckless and wilful, with personalities that transcended their class and background, they re-wrote their destinies in remarkable, entertaining and sometimes tragic ways. And between them they blazed the trail of the New Woman around the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: May 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9780230771680

Judith Mackrell

Judith Mackrell is a celebrated dance critic, writing first for the Independent and now for the Guardian. Her biography of the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, Bloomsbury Ballerina, was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award. She has also appeared on television and radio, as well as writing on dance, co-authoring The Oxford Dictionary of Dance. She lives in London with her family.

Reviews for Flappers

[kerns222 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The ME generation, part one. At least for women. Men have been me me me for a long time.
These women styled themselves, they did the both-ends-burning trick, and some lived to change. Social action was not high on their list in the 20's. The Great War ended thinking of anything but get mine. Then the 30's burnt out their candles (both ends). The book follows them until they fully snuffed out, some handling it better than others.

[jaylia3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Flappers is a book that time-trips into the brave new world tempest of the 1920’s through the lives of six independent-minded and fascinating women. Their backgrounds could hardly be more different, but each of them upended conventional expectations by working hard to discard the hand they had been dealt, and all them spent time in Paris, the magnetic city that drew seekers from across the globe looking for avant-garde adventure during the lively decade sandwiched between the Great War and the Great Depression.Lady Diana (Manners) Cooper posed nude for artists, married against her parents wishes, and worked as an actress to support her husband’s political career. Nancy Cunard, another upper class Brit, wrote poetry, ran her own printing press to publish Modernist, Surrealist, and Dada literature, developed a striking personal fashion based on African artifacts, and was muse and sometimes lover to many authors of the era. Tallulah Bankhead and Zelda Fitzgerald were southern girls and Alabama neighbors on similar quests for excitement, wider horizons, and artistic recognition. Josephine Baker, a poor black girl born in the slums of St. Louis, danced her way into the heart of Paris. Tamara de Lempicka, a Russian aristocrat displaced and penniless after the Russian Revolution, reinvented herself in Paris as an artist with a distinct and early Art Deco style--it’s her self portrait that’s on the cover of the book.Each woman has two in-depth, sympathetic but not hagiographic, and thoroughly interesting chapters devoted to her doings before and then during the 1920’s, so their lives during the 20’s are shown in context and it’s not hard to keep track of who is who. An Epilogue sketches the remainder of their stories, from the 1930’s until their deaths. Captivating as both a group biography and a history of its time, Flappers has added several books to my TBR list because I want to read more about several of the women--all six are intriguing but Tamara, Josephine, and Nancy really charmed and captured me.

[csmcmahon_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I picked this book up because I am fascinated by the 1920s and it didn't disappoint. Flappers offers a good snippet of six extraordinary women. Each woman is the subject of two chapters in the book; one about their beginnings and rise to prominence and one about their prominence and struggles later in life. I confess that I knew nothing about Lady Diana Cooper and felt less interested in the chapters related to her. It would appear that the author was particularly interested in her as her chapters seemed more complete. Personally the one thing that bugged me about the book was its comments about celebrity. These woman were the celebrities of their day. They struggled with combining their public and private lives. Yet I shudder tho think that in 80 or 90 years people will be reading about the likes of theKardashians, Paris Hilton, Miley, etc. I would prefer to live in a world where they are insignificant.