1920s Flappers

Self-labeled “sex-positive feminists” generally believe there shouldn’t be some universal, cookie cutter guideline for all women’s sexuality. As one sex worker and activist, Teri Goodson, said, “Some non-sex worker feminists seem to understand that the stigma and oppression of female prostitutes is used to uphold the double standard and is limiting to all women’s sexual freedom.” Those thoughts capture the essence of the liberalized women of the 1920s who shattered several cultural boundaries. In fact, these women were reverently labelled as “flappers,” a term popularized by F. Scott Fitzgerald in reference to those women. Mind you, the term “flapper” had previously been primarily associated with prostitutes.

Historians have widely acknowledged how prostitution, regrettably, was one of the few ways women could gain financial autonomy in our nation’s earliest years. However, prostitutes have rarely been considered the leaders of the women’s rights movement, but Thaddeus Russell, historian and author of A Renegade History of the

This was a time of significant social changes when various prudish social restrictions were lifted as they were no longer automatically associated with prostitution. For example, this was when it became generally acceptable for a woman to wear makeup in public. By 1927, a survey found that 50% of women then wore rouge. Again that wasn’t always the case. Karen Halttunen, author of Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study Of Middle-Class Culture In America, 1830-1870, noted that “(a)dvice books, fashion magazines, and etiquette manuals cautioned young women against emulating the arts of the painted woman, sometimes a prostitute but more often a woman of fashion, who poisoned polite society with deception and betrayal by dressing extravagantly and practicing empty forms of false etiquette.” Likewise, the views towards red dresses and lipstick changed during this era as