For many young women, the 1920s felt like a promise of liberty. It was a period
when they dared to shorten their skirts and shingle their hair, to smoke, drink,
take drugs and to claim sexual freedoms. In an era of soaring stock markets, co
nsumer expansion, urbanization and fast travel, women were reimagining both the
small detail and the large ambitions of their lives.
In Flappers, acclaimed b
iographer Judith Mackrell follows a group of six women - Diana Cooper, Nancy Cun
ard, Tallulah Bankhead, Zelda Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker and Tamara de Lempicka
- who, between them, exemplified the range and daring of that generation's spir
it. For them, the pursuit of experience was not just about dancing the Charlesto
n and wearing fashionable clothes. They made themselves prominent among the arti
sts, icons, and heroines of their age, pursuing experience in ways that their mo
thers could never have imagined, seeking to define what it was to be young and a
woman in an age where the smashing of old certainties had thrown the world wide
open.
Talented, reckless and wilful, with personalities that transcended the
ir class and background, they re-wrote their destinies in remarkable, entertaini
ng and sometimes tragic ways. And between them they blazed the trail of the New
Woman around the world.
