Flappers Thesis

The fight against women’s oppression has gone through many challenges throughout the decades, one of the most iconic changes being the flapper era. Flappers are well known for embracing their new freedoms such as; drinking, smoking, dancing, being more sexually promiscuous, and not adhering to the expectations that their previous feminist mothers had recently laid just a decade earlier. As flappers gained and used these new freedoms and advancements, many of their conservative elders started to worry about the implications of their new carefree actions. To deal with the flapper's new behavior, the elders began describing flappers as a phase in life that was okay for young adults to go through , while still expecting them to settle down and become a wife and care for the home later in life.

Flappers have become an iconic symbol for women's reform, making it the perfect candidate for snapshot history. Snapshot history, or the “use of one idea or image to summarize a decade” is often used in history classes to help condense the complexities of one decade into a single image, to help students remember what a term

Before the 1920’s, during World War 1, women were pushing social boundaries by creating large emphases on education, wage gaps, work conditions, and breaking the traditional gender roles that society puts in place . These women were encouraged to leave their housework behind and join the war efforts by taking over their husband’s jobs. During this time, many women's organizations, clubs, and unions were forming all trying to create spaces where women felt safe enough to address their experiences and issues publicly. Although these were very progressive advancements, there was a latent understanding that once the war was over women were expected to go back to their housework, and give the men their jobs