Vintage Clothing Exhibit 1920s
The Flaming Youth!
“An Age of Sheiks and Shebas”
“They’re all desperadoes, these kids, all of them with any life in their veins, the girls as well as the boys, maybe more than the boys.” Flaming Youth by Warner Fabian (aka Samuel Hopkins Adams*)
By Leslie Drollinger Stratmoen
For Flappers to Fringe
July 29, 2021
Looking back at the 1920s from a vantage point of 68 years later, Time Life books declares the decade as an age of “sheiks and shebas,” in the book, “This Fabulous Century.”
The writer proposes that the Twenties were both an exciting and frightening time to be young. It was the era, they say, of the first youth rebellion. Everything had changed. Boys no longer aspired to be “paragons of gallantry, industry and idealism” and the girls seemingly did not aspire to be modest and maidenly.
A Gaudy Spree
The article notes that the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: “The uncertainties of 1919 were over. America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history.”
Now, I’m not exactly sure how he came to that conclusion, but according to what I’ve read, it seems to be a consensus of thought at least in the upper and middle classes.
The Time Life article goes on to explain that it was the affluence of the decade combined with the “questioning of their elders’ authority” that “spawned” this new breed of young people who “claimed to be hard-boiled, heavy-drinking and daring.”
A Bit of Daring
I guess most shocking at the time was that the young women, in particular, had changed and were, indeed, becoming more daring, which is represented in their clothing. First, the skirts went up, to shorter than ever before, then their hair went off. Indeed, long flowing tresses were lopped off to create short chin-length bobs that could fit neatly under the new “peekaboo hats.” Those were the cloches designed to be pulled down over your eyes making you lean your head back in order to see, thus the name “peekaboo.” And, along with that, they were rolling down their silk stockings and blushing their knees. (Oh, my.)(PIC OF OAKLEY)
A New Found Freedom
We can only imagine the freedom they must have felt. Going from the form-fitting ankle-length hobble skirts that forced them to take baby steps, all the way to loose-fitting, knee-length frocks in which they could run to catch a trolley or dance the night away. And think for a minute about how they must’ve felt getting dressed each morning, to just throw on a silky, loose-fitting camisole and not a lung-crushing tight corset that needed to be laced on. I liken it to whipping off an underwire bra at the end of the day, as soon as you get home from work. Then there’s the hats. No longer did you have to brush and pin up your hair and balance a hat with a full garden of flowers on your head. Now, you just gave your hair a quick combing, slipped on your cloche and off you went.
But the daring went even further than clothes. These women of the Twenties were partying-it-up, you might say, going out drinking and dancing at speakeasies and smoking in public. So much so on the later that cigarette sales reportedly doubled during the decade, according to Time Life. (PIC of OAK SMOKING)
A Moral Revolution
Morals, too, were undergoing what Time Life describes as a revolution.
“More and more college-age boys owned automobiles – and were parking them on dark roads, to ‘neck’ with their dates. Inevitably, the daring clothes, the scandalous dances and sensual jazz, the late-night parties and cynical opinions of the youth drew the wrath of many members of the older generation.” (PIC OF AUTOS OR WILDNESS)
OK, let’s break that down: the Daring Clothes for women meant short knee-length sleeveless dresses that bared the arms and legs and were worn without a bra. Yes, I get it. That is a shocking change. The Scandalous Dances like the Charleston, Jitterbug and the Shimmy. I get that, too. Dresses swishing and swaying seductively as they shake their booty and flying up as the gals are kicking up their heels and flipping over. That would be enough, right there, to give the “old” ladies of the day heart palpitations. Oh my! Yes, scandalous, compared to the stately dances that went before like the waltz and foxtrot. Sensual Jazz?Yes, absolutely, that, too, is understandable based on the times. As for late-night parties and cynical opinions, well, that could refer to the young adults and teenagers of any modern decade, really.
In fact, to me, who came into adulthood in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, this all sounds pretty familiar. All of this daring behavior rings true for a kind of coming-of-age rebellion, or rite of passage, don’t you think? We, too, were hiking up our skirts, discarding our bras for halter tops, listening to sexually suggestive music and dancing a sort of bump and grind. And, just like our 1920s sisters, we were sending our parents and grandparents hearts a palpitatin’ over our wild behavior.
A Community Backlash
But, the authoritarian figures of the Twenties found all of this wild behavior to be of such great alarm that it was expressed publicly in quotes like this one from a Southern Baptist publication included in the Time Life article.
“The situation causes grave concern on the part of all who have the ideals at heart of purity and home life and the stability of our American civilization.”
Even public sentiment like that, though, didn’t sway the young people coming of age in the 1920s. They, seemingly didn’t care, proposed the writer of the Time Life book, saying: “They went right on in their heedless, happy way, adopting the outrageous fashions and singing,
‘In the meantime, in between time, ain’t we got fun?’”
Those “outrageous fashions” were depicted in the book as short skirts and powdered knees, cloche peekaboo hats over bobbed hair, flappy stovepipe “Oxford bags” pants and full-length rain slickers with galoshes left open to flap in the wind. That’s where some historians propose the name flapper came from, but I differ on that point. SEE FLAPPERS by CLICKING HERE
A Revelation
It all sounds pretty timid, in retrospect. But back in the day, it was not. Sheiks and Shebas? I’m not so sure. I had to look that up: A Sheik: a man held to be masterful and irresistibly charming to women. OK. That seems fitting for the times. But A Sheba must have meant something a little different than the descriptive words I found, like radiant, shrewd, wise, sure, wild and famous. Searching through my research material a little further, I found that a Sheba in 1920s speak meant -- a “hot number” or “a doll.”
So, Sheiks and Shebas? Were they? Irresistibly charming men and radiant, wild women?
Yes, I believe they were, in regard to the women, at least, and as Martha Stewart would say, “that’s a good thing.” It was the first step, really, to becoming our modern-day woman. Wouldn’t the elders of the day be astonished? To think that it was their daughters and granddaughters that had the courage to “dare” to reach for freedom of expression which turned out to be the first step for future generations.
Looking at the full picture in that way, it’s pretty cool. “We’ve come a long way, baby,” as the old slogan goes, and it’s thanks to these brave, daring women, who paved the way.
The Book *
WIKIPEDIA: “Flaming Youth” was a controversial book published in 1923 and written by Samuel Hopkins Adams which was adapted the same year into the silent film of the same name. It was this book, and subsequent movie, that some people say had great influence on the young adults of the day.
Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald referenced the book in his retrospective essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age.” He argued that Adams’ novel “persuaded certain moralistic Americans that their young girls would be ‘seduced without being ruined’ and thus altered the sexual mores of the nation.”
Adams actually wrote two novels in the 1920s. The other was “Unforbidden Fruit,” which dealt with “the sexual urges of young women in the Jazz Age.” Both of these novels “had a sexual frankness that was surprising for their time, and Adams published them under the pseudonym ‘Warner Fabian’ so his other works would not be tainted by any scandal.”
REFERENCE: “This Fabulous Century” book series, 1920-1930, Published in 1988 by Time Life Books; and Wikipedia.