History 474A
Devine
Spring 2022
Study Questions for Zeitz, Flapper
1. How was the flapper both “distinctly
real,” but also an artificially created “character type”? How did the flapper
emphasize individuality, but also conformity? (Introduction)
2. How is the flapper’s story also
the story of America in the 1920s? (Introduction)
3. What characteristics made Zelda
Sayre so popular with young men? How did she blend both traditional and modern
traits into her persona? (1)
4. How did Scott and Zelda’s
relationship illustrate the emergence of new “rules” that governed interactions
between men and women? How did these new rules depart from traditional
Victorian notions about how men and women should treat each other? (2)
5. What changes – technological,
economic, demographic – contributed to a “new dawn of freedom” for
young women in the 1920s? (3)
6. Why, for some young women, did
city life hold out the promise of social freedom, but not
the reality? (3)
7. How did the new urban leisure
culture create a “complex interplay among commerce, sexuality, and love” –
what Zeitz calls “the commercialization of
romance? (3)
8. Why was the publication of
Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise a significant cultural
event? (4)
9. Why did many Americans have fewer
children starting in the 1920s? How did this demographic trend affect attitudes
about sexuality, childrearing, family life, and the emergence of youth culture?
(4)
10. What factors account for the
incredible expansion of wealth in the US during the 1920s? Why was the
resulting wealth distributed so unevenly? (5)
11. How did the presence of more
wealth affect American culture – even its “fads and frivolities”? (5)
12. When Zelda Fitzgerald announced
“the flapper is deceased,” what did she mean? Why did she believe flappers
would make even better wives and mothers than Victorian girls had? (6)
13. As the nature of work and daily
life changed at the turn of the twentieth century, how did values and behavior
reflect those changes? How did advertisers facilitate this shift in values and
behavior and even redefine “the good life”? (6)
14. Why did Margaret Sanger see
contraception not as a “question of population” but as an “instrument of
liberation and human development”? Why did her arguments in favor of birth
control have special resonance during the 1920s? (6)
15. How, according to Zeitz, were the flappers proto-feminists? What
significance does he attribute to “choice”? (6)
16. How do we know that the United
States’ shift to a more modern culture did not occur without a struggle? What
evidence does Zeitz cite to demonstrate
this? (7)
17. How was the rise of
fundamentalism (in both religion and culture) related to the increase of choice
and diversity in American culture during the 1920s? How were the “culture wars”
of the 1920s an example of the tension between freedom and authority? (7)
18. How did the “process of cultural
transmission” spread “flapperdom” – and its fashions and values – from New York
to the rest of the nation? (8)
19. Why is it not surprising that a
magazine like The New Yorker emerged from the context of 1920s
Manhattan? What distinguished it from other popular magazines? (8)
20. Why did the New Yorker hire
Lois Long? Why did her columns prove so popular with readers? (9-10)
21. How did an earlier generation of
feminists react to the flapper? How did criticizing the flapper
actually paper over rifts within the feminist movement itself? (11)
22. According to Zeitz, how was the flapper’s preoccupation with establishing
herself as a unique individual in fact evidence that she was a “feminist”? (11)
23. What were the limits of the 1920s
“sexual revolution”? How did the “sexual candor” of the 1920s narrow the
romantic and sexual possibilities available to women? (12)
24. How did the phrase “Without
imagination, no wants” sum up the consumerist ethos of the 1920s? Why had
buying things become so important to people since the turn of the 20th century?
(17)
25. How had advertising changed
between the 1890s and the 1920s? What impediments did the ad men have to
overcome as they “taught” Americans to be good consumers? (17)
26. How did new technologies in
visual reproduction help fuel consumerism? (17)
27. How did filmmaker D.W. Griffith’s
declining popularity demonstrate that “times had changed” by the 1920s? (21)
28. How did Colleen Moore’s depiction
of a flapper blend rebellion and reassurance? How did Clara Bow provide an
“alternative” to Moore’s “winsome” flapper? (22)
29. How did Hollywood reflect and
shape the new modern culture that emerged during the 1920s? How did Hollywood
imagery affect women’s lives in particular?(24)
30. How did the arc of Scott and
Zelda’s relationship mirror the trajectory of the 1920s? (25)