Short Stuff: Flappers

00:00:04 Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here doing the Charleston on Dave's behalf, and this is Stuff You Should Know Short Stuff. Let's go now. All right. 00:00:16 Speaker 2: The year is 1915, everybody, and the word flapper is about to be introduced to the world by way of H. L. Minkin, a writer who wrote a, I guess, an essay about called the flapper for the literary magazine, The Smart Set. 00:00:33 Speaker 1: What a great mag. 00:00:34 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:00:36 Speaker 1: By the way, we should say that Private Eye is not a rag over in the UK. So sorry, everybody. I'm going to go ahead and assume The Smart Set wasn't either. But in this article or essay, Mencken is using a term that's already been established, flapper. It was, I think, British slang for a young girl, right? He's saying, no, no, no. We need to get more specific. There is a young girl that's emerging. They're not here yet, but I can see them coming out of the fabric of culture. And they are not going to follow these standards and traditions and moral codes that are handed down generation after generation. There's this new thing called media that is coming up, and that's what's going to influence them. And they're going to be total trailblazers. And he was right. Yeah. 00:01:24 Speaker 2: So the flapper would come along and kick what was known as the Gibson Girl to the curb. The Gibson Girl during the 1910s was created and popularized from an illustrator named Charles Dana Gibson. And this was like if you think of the Edwardian sort of corset wearing, updo hair wearing, choker, you know, like choker. dress that goes, a skirt that goes all the way to the past the ankle and like a choker up to under the chin. That's the Gibson girl look. And the flapper came along and said, no, no, no, no. We want to have more fun than that. 00:02:00 Speaker 1: They did. And they did. And it took the death of tens of millions of people to get them there. Because World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic were a one-two punch that killed a lot of people around the world. And in doing so, both of those things adjusted gender norms to the extent that all of a sudden, like the world couldn't afford to just keep women off to the side any longer. They were needed more than ever, like in the workforce, they needed to be educated. And so it opened all these opportunities for women to just kind of come out from under the thumb of their fathers and then their husbands. Yeah. 00:02:39 Speaker 2: And this kind of happened around 1920. When the Roaring Twenties came on the scene, there was a new woman emerging from the cocoon that kind of …