November 26, 2012

• Gibson Girls, Flappers, or Mad Molly Brown?

  I like to think of myself as a rebel. An outlaw. One bad.ass.girl. The truth is, though I may step outside of the box in some areas of my life, I am pretty darn boring in 99 percent of what I do. I go to work. I come home. I volunteer. I call my family. I clean. I bake. I walk the dog. What I like to think I am doing is this: I save the world. I travel the planet. I make unplanned drop ins at the families homes in between exotic travels and adventures. I eat in exotic new restaurants and sample new foods. I take my dog on ultra marathon races across mountains and deserts. I am too cool for school.

  If it were early twentieth century, I would like to have been a Flapper. Flappers were a “new breed” of young Western women in the 1920s who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to jazz, and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behavior. Flappers were seen as brash for wearing excessive makeup, drinking, treating sex in a casual manner, smoking, driving automobiles and otherwise flouting social and sexual norms. (Thank you Wikipedia)
  

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  F. Scott Fitzgerald described a Flapper as being lovely, expensive, and about 19. I think I missed the boat there. I can only imagine the excitement and scandal that it would create if I walked into a speakeasy on the arm of a mob boss… 

   

  I would probably not have been a Gibson Girl, I suppose. Gibson Girls were the first real symbol of beauty for an American woman. They were used as models to sell merchandise that was fashionable and excessive. They were cool, independent, aloof and would never lower themselves to participate in anything classless, such as the Suffrage Movement. They went to college to obtain an adequate mate, and any man would fall prey to their beauty and prostrate themselves for a kind word or affectionate glance from a Gibson Girl.

   

  

   

  Women gained the right to vote in 1920. So even with all the interesting and glamorous choices of what type of woman I wish I would have been in the roaring 20′s, I probably would have been sharing a cocktail with the Unsinkable Margaret Brown. I would be lamenting her loss as the first woman to run for public office, griping about cheating husbands and the state of affairs, and worrying about how this generation of women was going to continue her work. 

  

   

  The moral of my story is this: Wherever you go, there you are.

   

  • 11:31 pm
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