Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen Performers of the American 1920s (review)

Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen Performers of the American 1920s . By Angela J. Latham. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000; pp. 203. $50.00 cloth; $19.95 paper.

The word "flapper" often brings to mind a stereotypical image of women in the 1920s: short hair, short dress, and carefree attitude. Although there were certainly some flappers who fit this description, there were others who did not, or who simply did not identify with or support the flapper lifestyle. Through analysis of different kinds of "performances" as women in the 1920s, Angela Latham seeks to show that women of this decade were more than flappers, and that this fuller picture not only adds to women's history but also to our understanding of how these women are and were discussed. For example, Latham states, "Popular mythology holds that the 1920s were a historical milestone in American women's achievement of political and personal autonomy. . . . [f]reed at last from the fetters of American Victorianism, she was unrestrained by trailing skirts, corsets, or old-fashioned notions of sex" (7). This is the stereotypical image of the 1920's woman Latham seeks to dispel.

The recognition of censorship of women is not new to those familiar with feminist scholarship. However, rather than focusing on the censorship of women's voices, Latham analyzes the way in which women's bodies and the performance of their bodies in everyday life were censored through laws (for example, a city ordinance regulating hemlines) and social controls (for example, acceptance of burlesque shows, but not of women's sexual freedom). In this way, Latham, like Susan Bordo, is using women's bodies as a form of text to better understand how women's bodies reflected social values and tensions of the time.

In chapters 1 and 2 Latham shows how, in the early twenty-first century, images of the flapper have become romanticized to the point that we readily assume flappers were liberated women who enjoyed full equality with their male counterparts after securing the right to vote, taking off their corsets, and raising their hemlines. Latham cautions against this idealized stereotyping and reading of history, arguing that we should examine original documents of the decade to gain a fuller understanding of the reality that women lived, including the many oppressions they still faced such as restrictions in public voice, bathing costumes, and explorations of sexuality. Chapter 3, by focusing on the controversy surrounding women's bathing attire, examines newspaper reports about reactions to skimpier swimwear and how women used their bathing costumes to resist patriarchal control of their bodies. In chapters 4 and 5 Latham looks at the "performances" of women in the 1920s, finding that although most of these women did not enjoy the full equality that we of the early twenty-first century envision, there were individual women who worked to assert their independence in uniquely feminine ways such as adopting a certain kind of dress or attitude, or taking on certain fictional roles in the theater.

By analyzing written documents about and for women of this era, Latham takes us on a journey from the flapper to the theater star in women's efforts to assert autonomy. Latham takes each of the instances mentioned above in turn, beginning with the flapper as an example of fashion as independence and finishing with an in-depth analysis of the female roles in Ladies Night in a Turkish Bath. In each chapter Latham points to individual acts or words women used to fight against existing sexisms. For instance, when she discusses the controversy over bathing costumes in chapter 3, the reader learns how "bathing beauties" of the 1920s patronized beaches with the least restrictive policies on women's bathing attire in order to manipulate the capitalist system to relax policies countrywide.

Latham shows that although the flapper...