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This chapter examines general American dictionaries of slang. Several of the glossaries mentioned in this chapter were designed to explain American slang to a British audience, and at least one was derived from a dictionary of British slang. One of the concerns of this chapter is the problem of youth, as seen in the 1920s.

The 1920s was the golden age of the girl evangelist phenomenon. A primary reason for this was the dominant flapper in this period, for which girl evangelists presented a stark and curious contrast. However curious such girls were, they fit a decade noted for the strange and the novel. Also of importance was the role of Aimee Semple McPherson, who forged new avenues for women preachers and who trained even young children for evangelism. The popularity of Uldine Utley would have sparked some interest in preaching in other young girls, somewhat creating a copy-cat movement of girls into preaching careers. The renewal of revivalism by Pentecostals provided a ready platform for the young girls. As well, the general interest in society at large in child stars would have also provided some easy acceptance of the girl preachers. The role of the press was equally important, giving a nation-wide spotlight that the girls would not have otherwise had. Finally, the chapter deals with the survival of the phenomenon into the 1930s, a decade starkly different from the 1920s, when most of the novelty of the 1920s disappeared. Finally, comments are made on the significance of the phenomenon of girl evangelists.

The 1920s was marked by a revolution of manners and morals. Women, especially the flappers, have received much attention. But a stark contrast to the flappers had a stage during this period ‐‐ hundreds of young girl preachers such as Uldine Utley and Betty Weakland. This chapter examines the golden age of the phenomenon, situating girl evangelists in the age of child stars (even a child lecturer on atheism and evolution), a young Hollywood, competing news wire services, and a clash of cultures (between religion and secularism and, within religion, between Modernism and Fundamentalists). Also addressed is the importance of the newspaper record in identifying the phenomenon. As well, a definition of a “girl evangelist” is offered, with an examination of how various terms were used.

The 1920s roared onto the scene, challenging traditional norms and elevating novelty and experimentation. Women, and especially young women, the flappers, became the mark of the decade, with their flippant attitude to traditional behavior and their bold exhibit of shocking and risqué conduct in the new sexual revolution. This chapter deals mainly with the flapper phenomenon, both in terms of its supporters and its distracters. Revivalists and Fundamentalists feared the loss of traditional morals, and joined in the attack (along with numerous educators, civic leaders and clergy from mainstreams denominations, though voices of praise for the flappers came from these quarters as well). This an environment was ideal for the development of the girl evangelist phenomenon, for the girl preachers, proclaiming Jesus and denouncing sin, seemed as opposite to the new image of the feminine that had gained center stage.

Girl evangelists stood as a useful contrast to the new image of youth and the female. It was the press that first noticed this and made something of it. It gave them a concrete opposite of the flapper to exploit. But the contrast between the flapper and the girl evangelist was exaggerated. Not every girl labelled a flapper adopted every aspect of flapper behavior and dress. Not every girl evangelist rejected every aspect of flapper culture, though generally that amounted to little more than a bobbed hairstyle. For the most part, girl evangelists made flappers a target of their preaching, though some more gracefully than others. Revivalism and Pentecostalism became alarmed when flapper fashion (shorter dresses and use of cosmetics) were adopted by members of their congregations, and girl evangelists, representing the ideal of the traditional girl, had to be careful not to adopt too much of the flapper style and thus lose their audience and support.

The girl evangelist was viewed as the antithesis of the flapper, by her supporters and by the press and public. Since a bold sexuality was part of the flapper persona, the girl evangelists had to be careful to avoid any such appearance of using sexual charms. But revivalism, in many ways, was a stage, with the revivalist a star and the audience the fans. Aspects of sexuality could not be avoided in such an environment. Women revivalists such as Aimee Semple McPherson were sometimes accused of using her feminine charms, and some worried that at least an element of the audience who came to hear women and girl preachers had less than pure motives. Although the matter is rarely confronted head-on, there seems to have been a growing awareness of the problem, and this in some ways helped bring about a decline in the phenomenon.

Novelists as well as reformers in the interwar period depicted three competing versions of companionate marriage. The most widespread was “flapper marriage,” which modernized but did not really confront male dominance. Its proponents acclaimed flapper wives who had rejected demure styles of femininity, but they demonized powerful matriarchs and independent career women. African Americans imagined “partnership marriage,” in which marital roles were less distinct, wives were often employed, and marriage was more anchored in wider kin and community networks. Black and white feminists sought “feminist marriage,” in which not only sex but also paid work and household labor involved greater equality between women and men. Although all versions accepted more individual freedom in style and public behavior than Victorian mores allowed, only African Americans seriously supported individual freedom to choose marriage partners across racial lines.

This chapter examines the reconstruction of the female body and beauty, and considers how classical and modern imagery manufactured sexuality and gender ideals for women. Investigating women's claims to subjective and ‘embodied truth’ during the ‘Golden Age of Woman’, this chapter first turns to sports and technology. Second, it discusses the globalized figures of ‘Modern Diana’ and ‘New Venus’ — featuring in Anglophone beauty cultures, advertising, modern art, and graphic design. Third, this chapter considers the drive for slimness in fashion and fitness culture in the context of utopian ideals about personal transformation. Fourth, the commodification of beauty is considered alongside the political and commercial incentives to strive for bodily perfection. The ‘Golden Age of Woman’ was a global language articulating belief in women's social and sexual freedom; yet how did the ‘liberated self’ correspond to the complexities of postwar sexual morality and the compelling regimes of consumer culture?

This chapter covers Wong's rise to Hollywood stardom while hampered by yellow face competition and rules against mixed race romance on screen. It discusses her flapper persona, mixed race romances and struggles conservative family life. It discusses her stardom in Toll of the Sea, Thief of Bagdad and Peter Pan with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and Betty Bronson. It also shows her frustrations with film parts and determination to seek fuller life and career in Europe

This chapter describes American women of the 1920s. The 1920s marked not only a great economic transformation but also the greatest social change of all time for women all around the globe. Following World War I and the example of Europeans, American women shortened their skirts, cut their hair, smoked cigarettes, and drank in speakeasies—during a time when alcohol was prohibited but narcotics were legalized. They drove cars, read Freudian psychology, danced sexily to new jazz, and imitated fashion and behavior from new movies. The “flapper” of the 1920s was liberated beyond any woman before in human history. Understandably, there was great generational conflict, and in the midst of all this hurried yet profound change, exercising the vote that older women had worked so hard to obtain in the previous decade seemed almost minor and political feminism appeared almost passé.

This chapter focuses on Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), which was written and published at the height of the Roaring Twenties. In Coming of Age, Mead encapsulated 1920s ambivalences about progress and loss, science and communal values, the possibilities for happiness, and the superiorities of civilization. The Samoan girl in the story, who is sexually free and without any value conflicts, epitomizes the loss ensuing from civilization. In Freudian terms, she represents the pre-oedipal self that is whole, without repression, innocent, and undamaged. She stands in marked contrast to the flapper—the most problematic figure of the twenties—who epitomized not only loss of innocence but also loss of unity between the individual and the community.

This chapter explores how the social perception and cultural representation of dancing – especially its chief enthusiasts, professionals, and the public venues where it took place – were shaped by contemporary anxieties about gender, class, and sexuality. It examines the controversies that surrounded the ‘dancing girl’ (also called the flapper or modern woman), as well as the male ‘lounge lizard’ or ‘dancing dandy’, within the context of the gender upheavals that occurred during and immediately after the First World War. The chapter also considers the negative assumptions about particular public dancing spaces, as well as the paid dance partners who were employed within them, showing that these were underpinned by class prejudice and anxieties about crime and sexual immorality. However, the chapter argues that social concerns about dancing were strongly contested from the very start of the modern dance era, and that this leisure form became progressively more respectable and integrated into the national culture as professionalisation and commercialisation processes progressed throughout the interwar years.

This chapter examines the 1920s as an era, specifically as the Prohibition era, and looks at how certain aspects of the decade famously came to define the character of the city of Chicago. After all, Chicago, literally the world’s capital of saloon culture, was where the battle of the wets and the drys was most conspicuously fought during the thirteen years till Repeal. Democracy trains people to choose their lives, for good or ill, and a sumptuary law virtually forces a free people to rebel. The 1920s was a rebellion decade generally. Moreover, there was jazz, the greatest portmanteau concept in the history of the American language. “Jazz” meant everything that was new, dangerous, delicious, and liberating. Jazz was the opposite of the ice-cream social and the sermon. Yes, it was music, but, even more, it appeared to be anything community leaders warned would bring down society.

Chapter 2 examines the politics of emotion and corporeality in Anita Loos’s 1925 satire of Jazz Age femininity, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Blondes is both a satire of a nineteenth-century sentimental novel and a sentimental novel in its own right. The chapter argues that such indeterminacy undergirds Loos’s send-up of the flapper as a figure whose interiority and exteriority are vitally opaque. Loos’s “more old fashioned girl” performs the flapper’s conflicted sexuality and exposes the gendered contradictions of Freudian psychoanalysis and the modernist language experiments exemplified by Gertrude Stein. The chapter connects the novel to contemporary legal debates about minimum wage and prostitution. It therefore argues that Blondes can also be seen as a mock manifesto, a companion piece to other period texts that tread an unclear line between irony and sincerity as they engage politicized discourse about women’s bodies.

Having examined the development of a mass audience for dancing, and the important social functions that it performed, the final section of the book examines moral panic and the dance hall and makes an assessment of wider reactions to dance halls and dancing in the period, relating them to the political, economic, and social contexts of the time. Chapter 8 deals with issues of morality and gender. Great concern was created by the coming together of men and women in a supposedly intimate manner on the dance floor. This chapter identifies the moral panic created by the new music and new dances. It examines how the behaviour of men and women in the dance hall was seen to reflect changing notions of femininity and masculinity and new attitudes towards sex. It identifies and analyses several key types of women—the Flapper, Good Time Girl, Snooty Cutie, and Palais Pearl.

This chapter considers the sexuality effects of a film released on the cusp of the transition to sound and which redeploys the codes of a nearly exhausted genre, the flapper film. While several scholars have read The Wild Party (dir. Dorothy Arzner, Paramount Lasky, 1929) in terms of its lesbian subtext, a mode of interpretation shaped by a representational regime that postdates the film’s release, this chapter traces how the visual erotics mobilized across the entire film render such scenes sexually legible. “Mobilizing Genre” argues that the site through which lesbian possibilities are paradoxically screened—that is, both projected and hidden from view—is the sexualized and kinetic body of the feminine flapper. In failing to anchor same-sex desire definitively to any one sexual category, The Wild Party’s sexual kinesthetics demonstrate the centrality of same-sex desire to female spectatorship in Hollywood cinema, and its intimate and productive relation to new erotic discourses of both homo- and heterosexuality.