THE “DANGEROUS CHANCE OF BEING A FLAPPER:” THE BLACK FLAPPER’S CHALLENGE TO RESPECTABILITY IN THE CHICAGO DEFENDER, 1920-1929

by

EMILY SPARKS

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

Department of History

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

May, 2018 ii

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

We hereby approve the thesis of

EMILY SPARKS

Candidate for the degree of Master of Arts

Committee Chair Renee Sentilles

Committee Member Daniel Cohen

Committee Member Peter Shulman

Committee Member Einav Rabinovitch-Fox

Date of Defense March 26, 2018

*We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein.

iii

Table of Contents

Abstract iv

Introduction 1

The Roaring Twenties 4

The Flapper 9

The Black Flapper 13

Criticizing the Flapper 15

Mocking the Flapper: Humor as Critique 25

The Flapper Onstage: A Respectable Exception 30

Conclusion 37

Bibliography 40

iv

The “Dangerous Chance of Being a Flapper:” The Black Flapper’s Challenge To Respectability In The Chicago Defender, 1920-1929

Abstract by

EMILY SPARKS

A potent symbol of the Roaring Twenties, the archetypical flapper was invariably

portrayed as a young woman wearing bobbed hair, heavy makeup, short skirts, and rolled

stockings. She enjoyed drinking, dancing, and dating. This thesis explores how flappers

were portrayed in the Chicago Defender, a major African-American newspaper. This lens unearths the black flapper – long overlooked by historians and media – and interrogates her meaning in terms of racial uplift and respectability. In turning away from respectability, the black flapper threatened to derail the ongoing project of racial uplift.

The exception was a performance context, in which flapper characters onstage were seen as respectable workers instead of threateningly independent young women, and, as performers, often drew praise. The Chicago Defender’s response to the flapper, a figure who epitomized women’s new roles in the decade, illuminates contemporary discourse around sexuality, youth culture, and racial uplift. 1

Introduction A potent symbol of the Roaring Twenties, the archetypical flapper was invariably portrayed as a young woman wearing bobbed hair, heavy makeup, short skirts, and rolled stockings. She enjoyed drinking, dancing, and dating – the latter especially when she could separate a naïve man from his money. In movies and advertisements, she was almost always white. Finally, she embraced the new sexual and economic freedoms available to women after World War I. For this independent behavior, she became a social problem in the eyes of her elders, threatening established gender norms. Historians have understood this archetype as an image created by print media, advertising, and

Hollywood. Nonetheless, they have generally upheld its accuracy as a representation of real-life flapperdom, while also seeking to delineate the extent to which any individual flapper fit the stereotype.

While this image has fascinated historians and artists alike, her black counterpart has been overlooked in media and literature. Here, I turn to the

Chicago Defender, one of the early twentieth century’s most widely circulated

African-American newspapers, to unearth this figure and interrogate her meaning within the black community in Chicago and the wider Defender readership.

Young black women both identified themselves as flappers, and were recognized as flappers by observers. The Defender’s moral censure in response to these young women illuminates contemporary discourse around sexuality, youth culture, and racial uplift. The critiques leveled at flappers from the pages of the

Defender reflected and attempted to reinforce standards of respectable behavior, as defined by black elites. The black flapper, in turning away from respectability, 2

threatened to derail the ongoing project of racial uplift. Although many of the

contemporary criticisms of black and white flappers sound, superficially, the

same, the extra weight of racial responsibility made the black flapper uniquely

threatening. I argue that respectability is the best framework for understanding the

Chicago Defender’s attitude toward the flapper and the generation of young

women she represented. This framework also explains a notable exception to the

rule: flappers in theatrical contexts were not seen as threatening at all. Whereas

advice columnists and editorial writers condemned everyday flappers as frivolous,

deceitful, and immodest, reviewers and reporters praised theatrical flappers as

enjoyable entertainers. Performers’ positions in a long, respectable tradition of

black theater allowed them social leeway for “bad” behavior within the limited

context of the stage, where it was understood as temporary, artificial, and artistic.

The short, anonymously authored article “The Flapper Age” sketches out several themes that characterize the Defender’s coverage of flappers throughout the decade. First, the author accuses flappers of lax morals:

One of the great problems we are facing today is immorality in our whole social structure. Modesty and kindred virtues have been thrown to the winds and not a few of our younger generation are allowing their baser natures to dominate. It is not an uncommon sight to see young girls smoking cigarets [sic], drinking, lounging publicly in the arms of “Daddy” or dancing suggestively to a “jazz.” Their language...is coarse and borders on the vulgar. While their costume, if such it may be called, is more noticeable for what it displays of the body than what it hides.1

Revealing clothing, drinking, dancing, smoking, and intimate relationships with men are all signs of immorality, and this behavior by young girls reflects a decline in standards for the “whole social structure.” Respectability discourse among

1 “The ‘Flapper’ Age,” Chicago Defender, July 29, 1922. 3

black elites and middle-class leaders held women and girls responsible for the

future of the race. When the flapper’s slouching shoulders seemed unable to bear

such weight, she became a scapegoat for anxiety about modern life and women’s

new social and economic freedom.

Yet the author is quick to clarify that he blames white girls, not members of his own race:

The women of our group, young and old, have been unjustly accused of being lax in their morals. ...Today the Colored girl is the most modestly dressed member of the female sex on our streets. True, we have a few rattle-brained “flappers,” but the great majority dress and act in a manner convincing to any fair-minded person that virtue and good breeding are not confined solely to the Caucasian race.

The author sought to strike a balance between condemning flappers and upholding a moral, positive image of African-Americans. The Chicago Defender was specifically created to promote and encourage the accomplishments of black people. A wholesale condemnation of black flappers threatened to undermine that goal. Highlighting the flapper’s sexuality also risked the appearance of verifying racist stereotypes of black women as sexually immoral Jezebels. Aware of these traps, the author emphasizes black women’s virtue in contrast to degenerate white flappers. This, too, reflects respectability discourse.

Third, the author offers a winking, unserious conclusion.

Unconventional things today are conventional things tomorrow. Younger generations always seem to be in peril in the estimation of the generation just passing off the stage. It is all a part of life’s game. We are living in a “flapper” age.

He dismisses the flapper as just “part of life’s game,” one stage in an endless cycle of generational conflict. The moral decline she represents is not permanent. It is simply the 4 current age. This age will pass, until eventually the flapper becomes the concerned older generation alarmed at the morals of the young. When the flapper could be thus disregarded, she became less threatening. In the Defender, such dismissal happened through humor, through the kind of faint contempt this author displays, and through the remove offered by theater. In all these cases, black discourse on the flapper aimed to minimize the upheaval and immorality she represented.

The Roaring Twenties The 1920s were a time of excitement and change, often rendered in the popular and historical imagination as a decade filled with prosperity, hedonistic pleasure, speed, and an apathy toward politics. This fun interlude stands in particularly sharp contrast to the war before it and the grimness of the Great Depression that followed. There is some truth to this image, although it omits the decade’s political conservatism and racial tension. The U.S. emerged as a global power in the wake of World War I, and the economy soared, creating a sense of peace and prosperity. For the first time, according to the 1920 census, half of America’s population lived in cities.2 Although these trends – an industrialized economy and an urban population – had started before the turn of the century, contemporaries saw them as marking a distinct new era after the war. This new era was both exciting and anxiety-provoking.

The perception of change was reinforced by relatively new forms of mass media.

Magazines and movies reached national audiences. This meant that, for example, John

Held’s iconic caricatures of the flapper could be seen by people living far from the big

2 Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper : American Culture and Society in the 1920s, 1st ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 6.; Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty : Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995), 4. 5 cities where flappers congregated. It also meant an expansion of advertising, which was indispensable to a new cultural emphasis on consumerism. Lynn Dumenil argues that consumerism offered “an antidote to the loss of power in the modern world, to the problem of hierarchy, routinization, and standardization.”3 In other words, buying new products let consumers reassert a sense of control that had disappeared from increasingly mechanized factories and hierarchical offices. Advertisers exploited and encouraged this feeling, convincing consumers they needed new products to maintain a certain lifestyle.

Mass media and the advertising that accompanied it promoted urban, middle-class values and lifestyles nationwide, helping the mood of prosperous urban America become the mood of the nation.4

Changes in women’s roles also contributed to the feeling that a new era was at hand. The 19th Amendment, passed in 1920, granted women the right to vote. Although it turned out that women did not vote as a bloc and suffrage therefore did not lead to any immediate, sweeping political changes, women’s newfound power nonetheless struck contemporaries as a significant change. With the vote, women had a new role in public life. They also became more visible in the workplace after the war, a change driven primarily by an increase in married women working.5 Most visible, and most alarming to some observers, was young women’s new participation in youth culture. In cities especially, female high school and college students socialized, unchaperoned, with their male peers. They embraced looser clothing, shorter skirts, bobbed hair, and cosmetics.

3 Dumenil, The Modern Temper : American Culture and Society in the 1920s, 58. 4 On John Held see Carolyn L. Kitch, The Girl on the Magazine Cover : The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).; On magazines, see Richard M. (Richard Malin) Ohmann, Selling Culture : Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (London: Verso, 1996).; Matthew. Schneirov, The Dream of a New Social Order : Popular Magazines in America, 1893-1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 5 Dumenil, The Modern Temper : American Culture and Society in the 1920s, Chapter 3. 6

Even worse, young women openly engaged in sexual activity. “Traditionalists” worried

that youth had abandoned all standards of morality.6 The flapper, in all her varied forms

as stereotype, media image, and real woman, represented the epitome of this new, amoral

role. As a symptom of economic and social change, the flapper not only threatened

gender norms but represented change in general.7

The largely positive, fast-paced media image of the Jazz Age was a white one. For black Americans, these changes occurred against a background of continuing racial discrimination and geographic upheaval, creating simmering tensions both in relation to whites and within the black community. Starting in the 1890s, African-Americans had moved north in large numbers, a trend that accelerated and became known as the Great

Migration during and after World War I. Chicago’s black population more than doubled in the 1910s.8 In the south, African-Americans faced the ever-present threat of violence,

Jim Crow segregation, and persistently low earnings. Few could realistically hope to own land, though many aspired to. In contrast, the North seemed to offer social freedom and better economic opportunity. Chicago became one of the most popular destinations for migrants, thanks in large part to the Chicago Defender’s tireless promotion of the city

and of migration after 1916. 9 Because of its dramatic population growth, active press, and cultural importance for blacks (second only to Harlem), Chicago offers an excellent window into the experience of migrants and the communities they joined.

6 Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful : American Youth in the 1920’s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 20. 7 Joshua. Zeitz, Flapper : A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 29-30. 8 James R. Grossman, Land of Hope : Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration, (University of Chicago Press, 1989), 4. 9 Ibid., 16-18; Chapter 3. 7

The rosy picture the Defender painted in trying to attract migrants was incomplete. In the early years of the Great Migration, black elites in both the north and the south discouraged migrants. Historian James Grossman argues that “mass migration to the North...threatened to cut into the constituency of the South’s...[black] leadership

[and] questioned its ideological framework.”10 Before 1916, even the Defender did not

urge Southern blacks to move, arguing instead that conditions would improve in the

South. When Defender publisher Robert Abbott did begin to encourage migration, he

accentuated the positive, overstating the level of racial integration in Chicago and

presenting a unified black community.11 In reality, housing and school segregation had

taken firm hold by 1920, and job opportunities remained limited. Within the black

community, class tensions emerged between new migrants and the older black elite.

Though there were divisions among the elite, too – particularly between those, like

Abbott, who were migrants themselves and those who were Chicago natives – both

groups complained of new migrants not living up to standards of proper behavior. This

tension was rarely made explicit in the Defender, but its instructions to new migrants

reflected Abbott’s position in the new elite.12 The Defender promoted respectable,

middle-class values, while also seeking to appeal to a mass readership with sensational stories and ads.13

These values drew on a discourse about racial destiny, uplift, and advancement

that had interested African-American thinkers since Reconstruction. Racial destiny

10 Ibid., 57. 11 Ibid., 81. 12 Ibid., 129-132 13Kreiling, “The Commercialization of the Black Press and the Rise of Race News in Chicago,” in Ruthless Criticism: New Perspectives in U.S. Communication History, ed. William S. Solomon and Robert W. McChesney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 157. 8

asserted that all African-Americans shared collective interests. Writers and activists

debated the best strategies for securing those interests, discussed in terms of “uplifting”

and “advancing” the race.14 By the early twentieth century, the dominant philosophy

among African-American leaders held that racial uplift depended upon individuals’

proper conduct. This discourse contended that “morality, thrift, and hard work were

essential to black progress,” and led to “concerted efforts to police intraracial activity.”15

By the 1920s, the new black elite’s vision for proper behavior cohered around what

historians have termed the “politics of respectability.”16 Respectability called for sexual

purity, self-improvement (often through religion), cleanliness, and temperance. Historian

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham describes respectability as “a deliberate, highly self- conscious concession to hegemonic values.”17 In other words, by consciously adopting

white culture’s moral codes, black leaders asserted black Americans’ value and attempted

to refute the logic of racism. Thus, as the black flapper began to deviate from these moral

codes, higher stakes rode on her behavior than on that of the white flapper. For example,

marriage reformers of all races sought to integrate the new sexual norms of youth culture

into their ideals for a new “companionate marriage” model. However, where white

advocates of companionate marriage emphasized the independence of the married couple

from society, black reformers “continued to envision marriage as part of a wider African

American community and its struggle for race advancement.”18 The politics of

14 Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation : African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill ;;London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 8. 15 Mitchell, 9, 10. 16 Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent : The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 186. 17 Ibid., 193. 18 Christina Simmons, Making Marriage Modern : Women’s Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II (New York ;;Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 153. 9

respectability – especially holding women responsible for the future of the race - forms

the ideological backbone of the Chicago Defender’s condemnation of black flappers.

The Flapper By the late 1910s, “flapper” referred to a teenage girl. Conflicting accounts of the

word’s origins agree it originated in England. It may have been borrowed from hunting

terminology meaning a young duck, and first been applied to girls in reference to the

awkwardness of a teenager’s gangly limbs.19 Later authors connected the word to the

“flapping” of young women’s unfastened galoshes.20 By 1920, “flapper” came to mean a

single woman who participated in post-World War I youth culture of unchaperoned,

mixed-gender socializing, ranging in age anywhere from mid-teens to her early twenties.

The publication in 1920 of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story collection Flappers and

Philosophers helped popularize this usage. Drinking, smoking, and dancing – especially new dances such as the black bottom and shimmy, which were seen as blatantly sexual – were also elements of this youth culture, and became part of the definition of “flapper.”

Finally, the flapper became associated with a certain visual style. She wore short skirts with dropped waists, rolled her stockings below the knee, bobbed her hair, and used makeup.

Although the flapper was a new figure, she emerged out of longer-term trends.

Historian James McGovern argues that the much-vaunted “revolution in manners and

19 Kenneth A. Yellis, “Prosperity's Child: Some Thoughts on the Flapper,” American Quarterly 21, no. 1 (1969): 49.; “The Flapper That Was,” New York Times, February 19, 1922; “Exit the Flapper Via Longer Skirts,” New York Times, June 25, 1922. Einav Rabinovitch-Fox, “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like: The New Woman Image, American Feminism, and the Politics of Women’s Fashion 1890-1930” (PhD Diss., New York University, 2014), 131. 20 “Flappers Flaunt Fads in Footwear,” New York Times, January 29, 1922; “The Business World,” New York Times May 16, 1922. 10

morals” after World War I actually began in the Progressive era as women took on more

roles outside the home.21 Similarly, historian Joshua Zeitz emphasizes that increased

female employment and urbanization, both of which started well before World War I,

made the flapper’s lifestyle possible.22 These same trends enabled the New Woman of the

1890s, who, like the flapper, lived and worked independently of marriage. Some

historians have seen the flapper as another form of the New Woman.23 Even with these

precedents, though, the flapper’s fashion marked a striking visual change from earlier,

corseted styles, and she had more unchaperoned interaction with men her age than most

middle- or upper-class girls before her.

These changes prompted her critics to consider the flapper uniquely dangerous.

Much of the scholarly work on the flapper has focused on her status as a threat to

established gender roles. Kenneth Yellis phrases it with particular flair when he writes

that “rejection of the traditional family relation by the new American woman was a

personal tragedy for the American male.”24 This was an exaggeration; most flappers did not, ultimately, reject traditional family relationships. They merely delayed marriage and dated without parental involvement. Among white middle-class Americans, the flapper represented a new, sexualized youth culture, which eventually became mainstream under an ideology historians Estelle Freedman and John D’Emilio have labeled “sexual

21 James R. McGovern, “The American Woman’s Pre-World War I Freedom in Manners and Morals,” Journal of American History 55, no. 2 (1968): 315-16. 22 Joshua Zeitz, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006), 29-30. 23 For overviews of the flapper and her connections to the New Woman, see Estelle B Freedman, “The New Woman : Changing Views of Women in the 1920s,” The Journal of American History 61, no. 2 (1974): 372–93; Yellis, “Prosperity's Child: Some Thoughts on the Flapper”; Carolyn Kitch, The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)Kitch, The Girl on the Magazine Cover : The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media.; McGovern, “The American Woman’s Pre-World War I Freedom in Manners and Morals”; Zeitz, Flapper. 24 Yellis, “Prosperity's Child: Some Thoughts on the Flapper,” 48. 11 liberalism.” But even this liberalism, which “detached sexual activity from...procreation, affirmed heterosexual pleasure as a value in itself, defined sexual satisfaction as a critical component of personal happiness and successful marriage, and weakened the connections between sexual expression and marriage by providing youth with room for some experimentation,” had marriage and motherhood as its ultimate goal. 25 As Christina

Simmons argues, marriage reformers of the 1920s wanted to emphasize sexual expression within marriage, but these very reforms aimed to preserve marriage.26 However, the widespread perception that the flapper (before she settled down in marriage) represented a shift away from superior “traditional morality” cast the flapper as a new and disruptive figure.27

Later historians have taken a more measured tone but reached the same basic conclusion. Paula Fass sums up a similar prevailing view of the flapper when she writes that “youth suddenly became a social problem in the 1920s.”28 Like Yellis, Fass considers the 1920s to mark a distinct change in cultural norms among young people.

Fass’s lengthy discussions of controversies over young women’s bobbed hair, short skirts, drinking, dancing, and smoking demonstrates how these new norms were not quietly accepted by older generations.29 Fass argues that in rejecting the moral standards of adults, young people bound themselves to a new set of standards enforced by the peer group.30 This held true for sexual experimentation as well; while the flapper’s habits

25 John. D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters : A History of Sexuality in America (New York N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1988), 241. 26 Simmons, Making Marriage Modern : Women’s Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II, 106. 27 Yellis, “Prosperity's Child: Some Thoughts on the Flapper,” 45. 28 Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful : American Youth in the 1920’s.13. 29 Ibid., Chapter 7, 280-282. 30 Ibid., 292. 12

seemed liberated and promiscuous to an older generation, the norms of youth culture had

peer-enforced boundaries. 31 Yet by looking to the peer group instead of to the parents,

the flapper and her male companions threatened the very idea of adult authority over

young people’s leisure habits.

More recent work has examined the flapper’s self-presentation and its relationship

with media. Angela Latham’s book Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other

Brazen Performers of the 1920s argues that, through performance, flappers (among

others) “contested, affirmed, mitigated and revolutionized norms of female self-

presentation and self-stylization.”32 In this reading, the flapper’s challenge to gender

norms is real and deliberate, as well as deeply influenced by advertising, magazines, and

movies. The authors of The Modern Girl Around the World, a collection exploring the

flapper and her global counterparts, similarly emphasize that “the modern girl needs to be

examined in her manifestation as a style, an icon, and a performance.”33 Einav

Rabinovitch-Fox has focused on the style aspect, “examin[ing]…how fashion served as a realm where women could negotiate their identities and political status after suffrage.”

Rabinovitch-Fox argues that fashion “was instrumental in enabling women to express and demand sexual freedom, racial equality, and independence.”34 By understanding the flapper as a performance, these more recent works bring together flappers’ inner subjectivities and the societal upheaval she represented.

31 D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters : A History of Sexuality in America, 257. 32 Angela J. Latham, Posing a Threat : Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen Performers of the American 1920s (Published by University Press of New England [for] Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 5. 33 Alys Eve Weinbaum and Modern Girl Around the World Research Group., The Modern Girl around the World : Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Duke University Press, 2008), 11–12. 34 Rabinovitch-Fox, “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like: The New Woman Image, American Feminism, and the Politics of Women’s Fashion 1890-1930,” 126. 13

The Black Flapper White media, and, subsequently, historians, have ignored black flappers, but the

Defender did not. Black flappers appear in its pages over and over. Yet this discourse has often been overlooked because historians have accepted and perpetuated the view that the flapper, as an archetype, was a white figure. In the book Flapper, Joshua Zeitz argues that mainstream media defined flappers as exclusively white. As a primary example,

Zeitz points to New Yorker nightlife reporter Lois Long’s columns, including one in which she suggested black women ought to learn the Charleston from white women.

Zeitz correctly notes that this suggestion was both racist and frankly absurd, considering that black dancers had pioneered the Charleston. Still, he seems to accept the assertion that the flapper was white, since his book tells the stories of white women only.35

Carolyn Kitch’s study of magazine cover images also upholds the idea that the typical flapper was white. Her brief discussion of black flappers is relegated to a chapter titled

“Alternative Visions,” emphasizing that the black flapper was outside the mainstream of flapperdom.36

Even scholars who have specifically studied black women in the 1920s have not discussed black flappers. Babylon Girls, Jayna Brown’s history of black performance, deftly explores issues of colorism, geographic and class divisions, and sexuality among black performers and their audiences. Yet though she discusses behavior associated with the flapper (such as dancing the Charleston) and the kinds of performers identified as

35 Joshua Zeitz, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006), 194. 36 Kitch, The Girl on the Magazine Cover : The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media, 92–100. 14

flappers in the Defender, the word “flapper” does not appear in her book.37 Similarly,

Erin Chapman overlooks black flappers in her book on black women’s participation in

the “sex-race marketplace” of 1920s popular culture. She briefly asserts that the

blueswoman was the black equivalent of the white flapper, because both figures “built

upon many of the same shifting gender discourses and sexual mores.”38 However,

Chapman’s analogy ignores black women who claimed a flapper identity – and thereby

reinforces the image of the flapper as white. Einav Rabinovitch-Fox offers a notable

exception, arguing that the flapper transcended racial boundaries and exploring how

black women used the flapper image to challenge racial stereotypes.39

The first striking aspect of black flappers in the Chicago Defender is, simply,

their existence. A few articles directly mentioned both the race and flapper status of their

subjects, such as the 1922 article about the adorable young flappers referred to as

“Browns” at a Chicago dancing school,40 or the 1926 article which mentioned a “nut-

brown” flapper who interrupted a car race.41 Even an article defending black women

from accusations of immorality admitted that a few “rattle-brained” African-American

flappers existed.42 Girls also identified themselves as flappers in letters asking for advice

and petitioning for membership in the Billiken Club, a correspondence group for young

37 Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls : Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 38 Erin D. Chapman, Prove It on Me : New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s (Oxford ;;New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 81. 39 Rabinovitch-Fox, “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like: The New Woman Image, American Feminism, and the Politics of Women’s Fashion 1890-1930,” 127. 40 J Anderson Clarke, “Browns Have Bare Knees, Empty Heads,” Chicago Defender, June 24, 1922. 41 Salem Tutt Whitney, “Give Us Time,” Observations, Chicago Defender, June 12, 1926. 42 “The ‘Flapper’ Age,” Chicago Defender, July 29 1922. 15

readers.43 One woman used “Flapper Sally” as her pen name in Lights and Shadows, the

Defender’s regular poetry column. In identifying herself as a flapper in a column

intended “to prove…that given the proper encouragement, our people” – that is, African-

Americans – “would read and write,” Flapper Sally asserted both flapper and black

identities.44 The regular Lights and Shadows contributors often wrote letters to each

other, which were printed in the column. When Sally’s fellow contributors occasionally

mocked her flapper habits, but did not take issue with her race, they implicitly accepted

her dual identity.

Black entertainers also appeared as flappers. The Defender routinely listed and

reviewed theatrical productions. Its reviewers described members of the black musical

comedies Shuffle Along and Liza as flappers.45 Flappers also appeared in descriptions of

the Alabama Minstrels and in troupe names including the Bronze Flappers, the Creole

Flappers, and Ma Rainey’s Paramount Flappers.46 In short, the Defender addresses a

wide range of black flappers, both on the stage and on the street. This complicates the

historiographical image of the flapper as an exclusively white figure, and suggests a rich

new vein of analysis into changing gender norms and youth culture among blacks in the

1920s.

43 Alicia Ogburn, “Bookkeeper, Flapper, Billiken,” Chicago Defender, February 24, 1923; Dorothy Ogburn, “Some Flapper,” Chicago Defender, March 31, 1923; Princess Mysteria, Advice to the Wise and Otherwise, Chicago Defender, January 26, 1924; Princess Mysteria, Advice to the Wise and Otherwise, Chicago Defender, April 17, 1926. 44 Dewey R., “Defender Column Contributors Win High Honors,” Chicago Defender, July 30, 1927. 45 George Davis, “Shuffle Hits,” Chicago Defender March 1, 1924; Frank Montgomery, “Bits from Broadway,” Chicago Defender December 2, 1922; “’Liza’ Surpasses ‘Shuffle Along’ as a Dancing Show,” Chicago Defender, December 9, 1922; “Review A Hit,” Chicago Defender August 12, 1922; H.D. Garnett, “The Koppin Theater,” Chicago Defender, May 1, 1926. On Shuffle Along and Liza, see Allen L. Woll, Black Musical Theatre : From Coontown to Dreamgirls (Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 58–75. 46 A.O. Taylor, “The Buckeye State,” Chicago Defender, May 3, 1924; Tony Langston, “’Shake Your Feet’ a Hit at Grand; Clark’s ‘Radio Girls’ at Monogram,” Chicago Defender, March 10, 1923; “’Ma’ Rainey in Kansas City,” Chicago Defender, January 14, 1928; “Review a Hit,” Chicago Defender August 12, 1922; Thomas N. White, “Alabamas Out,” Chicago Defender, April 24, 1926. 16

Criticizing the Flapper The flapper embraced urban youth culture, which did not fit the norms of

respectability. Accordingly, the Defender, in general, painted a picture of the flapper as

an irresponsible, immoral ingénue. While the focus on the flapper was unique to the

1920s, policing young women’s behavior in the black press was nothing new. The

politics of respectability had long policed young women’s sexuality and reproduction.47

Motherhood was one key duty of the project of racial uplift. Some writers, both black and white, suggested that African-Americans were in literal danger of extinction.48 Thus

motherhood was crucial to securing the future of the race. Moreover, the behavior of

adolescents – especially girls – was seen as a reflection of their mother’s influence.49 In

other words, a “deviant” girl was worrying for two reasons: She not only threatened to

derail the future advancement of the race, but her behavior suggested that her own mother

had already erred. The Defender, like much of the black press, often emphasized the virtue of children, reminding readers that children “were an important part of the respectable black family.”50 When it came to the flapper, the Defender manifested this anxiety with a recurring fear that flappers would not fulfill their proper role as mothers.

The Defender’s advice columnist, Princess Mysteria, laid this out starkly in her response

to a young wife who missed going dancing: 51

47 Mitchell, Righteous Propagation : African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction, 9. 48 Ibid., 82-83. 49 LaKisha Michelle Simmons, Crescent City Girls : The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans, 2015, 127. 50 Simmons, 101. 51 Princess Mysteria was the pseudonym of “Hindu mentalist” Valeuda Strodder. Born in India, Strodder traveled extensively performing as a psychic, as well as writing the Defender’s “Advice to the Wise and Otherwise” column for a decade. “Princess Mysteria Pens Last ‘Advice to the Wise,’” Chicago Defender, March 22, 1930. 17

You are, or at least should be no longer a dance-mad, good-time loving flapper; you are a woman, a wife, and will shortly be a mother. How can you crave [going out and dancing], if you are sincere and earnest in your intentions toward your home, your husband, and child? There is something decidedly wrong with you and before many days you will be forced to account for your deficiencies.52

In this answer, Mysteria drew an explicit contrast between motherhood and

flapperhood. Wanting to dance somehow indicated a lack of motherly affection. Princess

Mysteria’s warning of an accounting to come suggested that the letter writer will pay for

having the wrong interests. Her ire extended to young men who liked flappers. She

warned readers that such men were undesirable husbands and would not be good

fathers.53 The Defender’s editorial voice echoed a similar sentiment with the headline

“Not A Flapper Mother,” above an article touting the accomplishments of Evelena

Burton and her seventeen children.54 Though the short blurb had no reference to flappers, the headline implied that an airheaded flapper would be incapable of the hard work

Evelena demonstrated, and that women should take pride in their roles as mothers. This attitude suggested flappers posed a twofold threat to family structure. First, flappers themselves were unfit mothers; second, they drew men away from their role as husbands and fathers. In the context of the Defender’s relentless focus on racial advancement, readers could easily understand these critiques as threats to the race as a whole.

The message that flappers attracted unfit men also came from the pulpit and was amplified in the Defender. The Reverend J. Milton Waldron of the Shiloh Baptist

Institutional church claimed that modern styles of dress “may appeal to the evil-minded,

52 Princess Mysteria, Advice to the Wise and Otherwise, Chicago Defender, December 29, 1923. 53 Princess Mysteria, Advice to the Wise and Otherwise, Chicago Defender, April 14, 1923. 54 “Not a Flapper Mother,” Chicago Defender, November 4, 1922 18

[but] they are detested by those who love virtue, chastity and modesty in women.”55 The reverend went on to claim that barely ten percent of men actually liked short skirts, and that if women really wanted to attract good men they would of their own volition grow their hair out and don longer dresses. This was, in another form, the same claim Mysteria made: those allegedly rare men who found flappers attractive were unworthy anyway.

Lest the reader fail to understand the stakes of the matter, the Defender’s headline clarified that what the pastor feared was nothing less than “Collapse of Home Life.”56 In

Asheville, North Carolina, Reverend Melvin Trotter admitted that skirt length itself did

not indicate evil, but thought women would attract more men if they wore longer skirts.57

Although few of these sermons, at least as reported in the Defender, explicitly

linked bad female behavior and race, the setting and the messages here were well in line

with racial uplift and respectability ideology. African-American churches during the

Great Migration served as a community resource, helping members find employment,

housing, and social programs.58 At the same time, church leaders sought to educate girls in what they considered proper behavior and to provide social and leisure opportunities that met their wholesome standards.59 The dance halls and other leisure spaces the flapper

enjoyed, however, were often outside church control. This no doubt added to black

leaders’ anxiety about the flapper. In turning away from the church, the flapper rejected

models of proper behavior. The consequences of such rejection, especially when it came

to motherhood, were dire. Flappers were failing to secure the future of the race. The

55 “Fears Collapse of Home Life in Extreme Styles: Pastor Uses 'Flapper' As His Subject,” Chicago Defender, February 12, 1927. 56 Ibid. 57 “Frank Styles of Flapper Lose Appeal, Says Divine,” Chicago Defender October 29, 1927. 58 Marcia Chatelain, South Side Girls : Growing up in the Great Migration (Duke University Press, 2015), 62–63. 59 Ibid., 67-69 19 insistence that good men were not attracted to flappers kept the blame firmly on women.

If women behaved and dressed correctly, they would attract the right men. The men who allegedly avoided flappers, meanwhile, proved their own virtue by not choosing women who might not uphold their racial duty.

Even a defender of the flapper considered her worth primarily as a future mother.

Dr. Lee Alexander Stone claimed “the flapper today is a blessing to mankind…women are becoming better from the standpoint of health. I say bless the flapper, for she will be the mother of a far healthier generation.”60 This defense, however, came only after Dr.

Stone criticized anti-flapper reformers; that is, his praise of flappers served as an explicit rebuke to the prevailing attitude. Moreover, Dr. Stone accepted the basic premise that motherhood was the right metric for evaluating a flapper’s value. While he disagreed with most about whether the flapper would be a good mother, his use of motherhood as a defense of the flapper was well within the framework of respectability politics.

A second critique of the flapper centered on her penchant for deceit, particularly in tricking men out of their hard-earned money. The flapper appeared as a gold-digger over and over. Howard Bunts, a regular contributor to the paper’s poetry column, warned other readers to “beware of flappers” after his date tricked him into buying her dinner.61

A columnist’s musings on Harlem reflected that “a man without money is as interesting to a Harlem flapper as a book without leaves."62 Flappers targeted strangers as well as dates. One article described how flappers would lament their broken garters and ask strange men for money to fix them, only to spend the money on sodas with their friends.

60 “Doctor Hits Reformers; Praises Modern Flapper,” Chicago Defender, October 29, 1927. 61 Howard Bunts, “Beware of Flappers,” Lights and Shadows, Chicago Defender, May 16, 1925. 62 Salem Tutt Whitney, “Timely Topics: Harlem,” Chicago Defender, April 28, 1928. 20

The flappers called the men they duped the “Star and Garter” organization.63 In this narrative, men were unwitting stooges in flapper schemes, not degenerates themselves.

Flappers rejected traditional courtship – the kind leading to marriage and motherhood – in favor of frivolous amusements. They saw men as mere accessories to help them afford small luxuries, not as partners. In short, flappers’ purported gold-digging was a symptom of the ways they threatened family structure and, in turn, the future of the race.

When not threatening men, flappers also threatened their own health. Two articles appealed to medical authority make this critique of flappers. One physician claimed makeup would ruin women’s skin.64 An English surgeon took flappers to task for binding their breasts: “The craze for the silhouette figure is a grave danger to the women themselves…In trying to look like boys the women of the present day are out, it seems, to destroy the character of their sex. Rubber contrivances for reducing the size of the hips and chest are very dangerous.”65 Regular readers of the Defender had long turned to it for health information, particularly from its recurring column by physician A. Wilberforce

Williams. Williams’s “Keeping Healthy” column and other health-related coverage both responded to reader interest and followed a widespread trend in African-American periodicals of the era.66 In this context, the unnamed physicians’ critique of flappers, given a platform by the Chicago Defender, carried the weight of authority. The

Defender’s health advice was part of its answer to the larger question of how black people should conduct themselves. Health was, in other words, desirable and part of

63 “Flappers Use New Methods to Get Money,” Chicago Defender, 13 May 1922. 64 “Physician Has Fears for Young Flappers,” Chicago Defender, June 17, 1922. 65 “Female More Like Monkey Than the Man: Eminent Surgeon Says They Are Imitative,” Chicago Defender, January 17, 1925. 66 Mitchell, Righteous Propagation : African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction, 101. 21

upright and moral conduct. Women’s health also affected their ability to bear children.

Thus the flapper’s cavalier disregard for her posture and her skin was a symptom of her

rejection of proper behavior, including motherhood.

Yet more threatening was the flapper’s disregard of modest sexual conduct. The

flapper’s alleged sexual activity was an important component of the archetype. It is

impossible from a newspaper to determine whether flappers’ promiscuity was real.

However, what the Defender does show is that the flapper was perceived as immorally

flirtatious and sexual. While the white flapper’s detractors also complained about her

sexuality, she was part of a larger shift toward sexual liberalism. In contrast, African-

American writers remained somewhat more conservative about sex.67 Conduct literature

aimed at black audiences in the early twentieth century emphasized modesty and reserved

sexuality for within marriage. In response to allegations of black degeneracy, black

conduct writers tended to obscure discussions of sexuality even within marriage. Conduct

literature itself functioned as a public performance of upright morality.68 Moreover, what

Michele Mitchell labeled a “politicized domesticity” tied desirable behavior by

individuals – including chastity before eventual marriage and motherhood – to the well-

being and advancement of the race as a whole.69 The flirtatious flapper, in her elders’ eyes, was anything but modest. Her apparent promiscuity was universally and repeatedly condemned in the Defender.

As with motherhood, Princess Mysteria laid out the critique most explicitly.

When a male reader wrote of his dismay at the discovery that his new wife had “done

67 Simmons, Making Marriage Modern : Women’s Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II, 153. 68 Mitchell, Righteous Propagation : African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction, 115. 69 Ibid., 135; Chapter 4. 22

lots” before their marriage and now compared him to her past beaux, Mysteria

sympathized, but warned him that “a good, true girl is exceptional in these days of the

vamp and flapper.”70 Though euphemistic, it is not hard to imagine what the girl had

“done” that a “true” girl would not. No imagination is required, however, to link these activities with the flapper; Mysteria makes that part clear. A few weeks later she again used sympathy with a virtuous teenager as a jumping-off point for a lecture:

It makes me feel proud to know that there are still a few young women who hold their young womanhood above reproach. There is nothing to be gained from that excessive familiarity which some girls give so freely. It will finally cause grief, loss of respect and complete ruin in any girl who continues to practice it.71

This tirade came in response to a girl wondering how to kindly turn down a marriage

proposal, not, as one might expect, someone asking about sex directly. In other words,

Mysteria believed so strongly in the dangers of “excessive familiarity” that she felt

compelled to rail against it on the merest hint of an opening. Her dire warnings of

“complete ruin” echoed a familiar theme of conduct literature aimed at black girls.72

This theme appeared elsewhere in the Defender as well. An editorial titled “The

Flapper and the Flipper” boldly declared in May 1922 that “flirts, male or female, by any

other name…are detestable.” The article disparaged the flapper for having low standards

in male companionship, and warned that flappers who sought rides from “flippers” – that

is, flirty young men – would only end up riding in an ambulance. The nature of the injury

that would send a girl to an ambulance is unspecified, but it clearly suggests that flirts will face dramatic consequences. Although the anonymous author acknowledges the

“flipper’s” role in flirting, he ended with a call for parents to prevent only their daughters

70 Princess Mysteria, Advice to the Wise and Otherwise, Chicago Defender, November 4, 1922. 71 Princess Mysteria, Advice to the Wise and Otherwise, Chicago Defender, December 9, 1922. 72 Mitchell, Righteous Propagation, 110–11. 23 from “drift[ing] into this flapper class.” 73 Just as Mysteria and church leaders placed the burden to be desirable mothers on women, this author placed the responsibility for not flirting on women, not men.

A pair of letters from young readers demonstrates how young women understood the links between flappers, flirtation, and racial pride, even when the Defender’s staff writers did not explicitly articulate the racial connection. Seventeen-year-old Louise

Thompson of Madisonville, Kentucky wrote that, though she did not drink, smoke, or pet, she found “plenty of boys who would be glad to take [her] out.” She admonished her flapper peers to “stop and think what your lives will be...You think your high life and slang will get you somewhere. Boys don’t care for it, but of course a boy will go as far as a girl will let him.” Thompson set her own sober ambitions in direct contrast to flappers’ fun: “I want to be a girl that my Race will be proud of, not just a toy for men, because that’s all you flappers are.”74 At seventeen, Thompson had absorbed the lessons of church leaders and conduct literature. She believed refraining from sexual activity was a woman’s responsibility, and that flappers failed to exercise restraint. Moreover, standards of behavior were so closely and widely connected to race advancement that she assumed her reader would see the opposition between “a girl...my Race will be proud of” and “a toy for men” as clearly as she did. Her assumption proved correct for at least one reader.

In response to Thompson’s letter, May L. Williams of Kansas City wrote how glad she was to see another young woman rejecting the flapper lifestyle. Williams’s letter echoed

Thompson’s with a call for other women to change their behavior and the claim that the writer was at least as well respected “as those taking the long, dangerous chance of being

73 “The Flapper and the Flipper,” Chicago Defender, May 6, 1922. 74 Louise Thompson, “She’s No Flapper,” Chicago Defender, August 18, 1928. 24

a flapper,” despite not petting or bobbing her hair. Williams suggested men could not be expected to control themselves: “I say a man would have to be made of iron to go along and mind his own business these days the way women dress and conduct themselves going into the streets.”75

These letters from readers reflected the same disapproving attitudes toward

flappers’ alleged promiscuity as articles by the Defender’s staff. Standards of respectable

bounds of sexuality were internalized and promoted by young women themselves.

Although many young women wanted to be flappers and happily identified as such, those

who bucked the trend by sticking to “old-fashioned” rules found the approval of their

elders. This complicates the idea that flapperdom represented a simple generational

conflict, especially for black women. Rather, young black women had to navigate

between pressure to uphold racialized ideals of respectable behavior and their desires to

enjoy modern entertainment options and male companionship. In its advice columns and

editorial articles, though, the Defender paid little attention to such nuance. Overall, the

average reader of the Defender could easily conclude that flappers were irredeemable

flirts who failed to act respectably and take their place as upstanding members of the

black community.

Yet the Defender, in promoting an overall positive image of African-Americans,

also sought to emphasize that the flapper was an unwelcome exception. As in “The

Flapper Age,” discussed above, authors contrasted black women’s virtue with that of

degenerate white flappers. One article, condemning the idea that white missionaries had

anything useful to teach the Chinese, included the flapper as one item in a long list of

75 May L. Williams, “Down with Flapper,” Chicago Defender, September 1, 1928. 25

problems “your white friends” had that the Chinese did not. The author repeated the

phrase “your white friends” in nearly every sentence, emphasizing the implication that

black people were not plagued with “hopelessly misguided family life” or children who

became “jazz-hounds, home-wreckers and safe-blowers.”76 The momentary denial of

black flappers’ existence allowed these articles to align with both the Defender’s generally negative stance toward non-theatrical flappers and its mission to advance the race.

Mocking the Flapper: Humor as Critique When the Defender did acknowledge black flappers, it doubled down on its

critiques with mockery toward the flapper. These jokes, which usually lampooned

flappers’ alluring clothes or their preying on men, reveal what was broadly understood

about flappers, because the humor rested on underlying assumptions or stereotypes. In

other words, humor can happen when the writer assumed the attitudes espoused by

Mysteria and other critics of the flapper were shared by the reader. In the case of the

flapper, the Defender’s readers were expected to laugh at her bad behavior. Often, this

alleged behavior had a sexual and even predatory overtone, and humor served as a thin

veil over male writers’ sexual interest. Editorial contributor “Sirrah Semaj” devoted a

column to quips about the flapper’s clothes and the men who admired her. He started by

writing that the flapper’s behavior would, in old days, be called “flip” rather than

“flapper.”77 By opening this way, Semaj set the context that even the things he goes on to

praise, such as a flapper rolling her own cigarettes, represented significant changes in

76 “Pity China,” The Week, Chicago Defender, May 7, 1927. 77 “According to Sirrah Semaj,” Chicago Defender, June 10, 1922. 26 accepted norms. The humorous tone of the column also undermines anything positive, because each statement is countered by a twist or punchline. Finally, Semaj’s emphasis on the flapper’s short skirts and plunging necklines clothing ensured that her body stayed at the forefront of the reader’s mind. Similarly, an editorial that charged a flapper with

“contributory negligence” for causing the driver to wreck his car “while getting his eye full,” took the man’s desire for granted while implying that the flapper’s outfit had purposefully attracted his eye.

Lights and Shadows, the Defender’s recurring poetry column, was a regular source of these kinds of puns. Contributor Howard Bunts defined a flapper as a “person with clean looking face and dirty neck,” referring to the flapper’s makeup – creating a deceptively “clean looking face” – and her penchant for sexual activity, or “necking.” He also suggested fellow contributor Flapper Sally would make a good artist because “she’s good at drawing men.”78 Another contributor wrote a poem illustrating a flapper’s skimpy clothes:

Mary bought a new dress. She put it on one day, But whether she was in or out Was really hard to say. Ye modern flapper and your dress, Why is it you do not freeze? How in the heck can you keep warm With dress below bosom and above the knees? 79

These kinds of poems and jokes paint an unflattering portrait, portraying the flapper as clever at ensnaring men but stupid in every other way. I use the word “ensnare” deliberately, for there is a pervasive suggestion that the flapper is only interested in a

78 Howard Bunts, “The New Dictionary,” Lights and Shadows, Chicago Defender, March 1, 1924; Howard Bunts, “LAS Forum,” Lights and Shadows, Chicago Defender, April 10, 1926. 79 Palmetto Blue Bubs, “Ye Flappers Make Me Rave,” Lights and Shadows, Chicago Defender, August 7, 1926. 27

man’s money, and she will happily change boyfriends at the earliest opportunity.

Moreover, when men become distracted or aroused by her clothing, it is her fault, never

his. Similarly, one poetry column contributor defined the flapper as “that female of the

human species whom you delight in watching on a sunshiny day so long as she isn’t your

wife or your sister.”80 This definition both emphasized and condemned the flapper’s sexual appeal. Though the quip skewers the watching man’s double standard, the very existence of that double standard casts flapperhood as immoral, and thus undesirable in a wife or sister.

Less vicious jests still played on these stereotypes, particularly the flapper’s

stupidity. One joke asked why the painter didn’t finish the head of a flapper’s portrait.

The painter answered that he couldn’t – the paint was not thick enough.81 Another Lights

and Shadows poem mocked the flapper for thinking she’d invented swearing, smoking,

and petting:

Say, flippy old flapper, you think you're the knobs, Swearing and petting and smoking corncobs. Say, flipping old flapper, you're nothing new now, You're the same old cat with the same meow. You think you're wild and you think you're gay, But you're just like your grandmother of the olden day.82

While this poem did not explicitly condemn the flapper’s behavior, it did paint the

flapper as presumptuously self-absorbed and ignorant of her predecessors. In the context

of the paper’s ubiquitous disparagement of the flapper’s intellect, readers could easily

take this as one more piece of evidence that the flapper was a dimwit. Even the children’s

page joined the mockery by answering the riddle “the flapper eats lots of them” with

80 This and That and T’Other: A Bit of News, Gossip, Fiction and Fun, Chicago Defender, October 21, 1922. This and That and T’Other was the recurring predecessor to Lights and Shadows. 81 Editorial article 3, Chicago Defender, April 21, 1923; no title, Chicago Defender, May 19, 1923. 82 “To Flapper Sally,” Lights and Shadows, Chicago Defender, April 3, 1926. 28

“dates.”83 The pun hinges on the triple meaning of “date” as a fruit, an activity, and a person; however, the idea that the flapper “eats” her dates fits comfortably with the archetype of the predatory, gold-digging flapper.

These jokes reinforced negative stereotypes and simultaneously dismissed and belittled the flapper. She became a laughingstock instead of a serious sign of moral decline. In other words, mockery offered a way to undercut the potential subversiveness of the flapper. But the flapper could not use this strategy to her own advantage. Because humor relied on widely disseminated criticisms of the flapper, it could only denigrate her further. Joking could neutralize the flapper, but it could never excuse her. At the same time, humorous references to flappers’ sexual appeal titillated the reader – and the writer

– while maintaining a veil of respectability. This winking critique allowed writers to enjoy sexual stereotypes without seeming to endorse them, and it subtly suggested to readers that the urban north offered sexual liberation. Even so, the surface-level critique made clear that the flapper, however attractive, represented a moral failure.

A brief contrast with the New York Times columnist Helen Bullit Lowry, who had no need to enforce respectability, provides an illustrative contrast here. In the

Defender, the flapper could be mocked because she broke the rules of respectable behavior; the rules themselves, however, were not a target. Lowry, a sharp, witty social critic, took free aim at both flappers and those trying to reform her. Her take on generational gaps in female behavior both acknowledges change and skewers any hope of reformers’ effectiveness:

In every community some changes have come that are amazing the Half a Generation Ago…

83 “? And Answers,” Chicago Defender, April 4, 1925. 29

Everybody has been trying this year as never before to make everybody else live by the ethics of his pet generation. The very blue law propagandists are trying to force the Generation Ago itself to live by the code of Two Generations Ago…And, with everybody trying to reform somebody else...surely somebody ought to have succeeded, or we ought to have a scientific explanation of what becomes of the waste energy. So one generation or the other must have turned over a new leaf on Jan. 1, 1921. The debate might be settled if we only knew which had done the deed.84

Lowry here makes the idea of generations absurd by taking categories to such extremes

as “Half a Generation Ago.” In doing so, she undermines the language of the reformers,

who treat generational gaps quite seriously. This is our first hint that Lowry is poking fun

at the critics of the flapper. Elsewhere, Lowry more explicitly dismissed reformers. First,

reporting on efforts in the Brown University student magazine to discourage women from

initiating physical contact with men, Lowry dryly noted that “as no big dance has been held since the editorials were published, it is too early to tell if the reform is ‘taking.’”85

Later in the same article, Lowry specified that this was not mere coincidence: “The chief

difficulty in collecting authentic information about what Mrs. Grundy really is

accomplishing is that much of her activity accomplishes nothing. ... Reforming flappers

is, so to speak, all over the place - but it's very difficult to know which of the reformers to take seriously.”86

Lowry’s mocking of the reformers is not simply a defense of the flapper. While

Lowry did occasionally defend the flapper directly, she did not spare them from mockery

either. The overall effect of her work is to make the whole flapper phenomenon into a

punchline – neither the flappers themselves nor the reformers need to be taken seriously.

84 Helen Bullit Lowry, “Mrs. Grundy and Miss 1921,” New York Times, January 23, 1921. 85 Helen Bullitt Lowry, “Mrs. Grundy on the Job of Reforming the Flapper,” New York Times March 27, 1921. 86 Ibid. 30

In Lowry’s writing, the flapper does not represent a serious threat, so the reformers are

wasting their time. Like the humor in the Defender, Lowry’s mockery undermines the

flapper’s potential for subversiveness. But unlike those writing in the Defender, Lowry,

writing for a white audience, is free to equally undermine the flapper’s critics. Such

critique would be impossible in the Defender. The critics of the flapper, especially voices

from the church, were those who promoted racial uplift. The Defender’s editorial stance

wholeheartedly embraced racial uplift ideology, including its policing of women’s

behavior. In other words, mockery of anti-flapper reformers in the Defender would have

undermined a much larger ideological project.

The Flapper Onstage: A Respectable Exception In contrast to the critiques lobbied at the average flapper, women who played

flapper characters on stage and screen often drew lavish praise. Performers were exempt from critique for two reasons. First, performance itself, as an occupation, was socially acceptable. Dancers, singers, and comediennes were understood as professional performers, not as flappers, even when they behaved as flappers onstage. Second, writers understood these performances as temporary and artificial. The antics of the movie star or chorus girl need not be taken seriously because it was not real. This analysis accords with

Angela Latham’s argument that scandalous behavior evoked less censure in theatrical settings than in everyday life.87 Though Latham and I agree on this basic point, we differ

on the analytical uses of performance. In examining the construction of flapper identity,

Latham considers all flappers performers, whether the performance was “internally

87 Latham, Posing a Threat : Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen Performers of the American 1920s, 154. 31 monitored” or “explicitly theatrical.”88 However, precisely because of the sharp divide in the Defender’s evaluation of flappers, I argue that performance in a non-theatrical context is not a useful historical concept for understanding reactions to the flapper.

Contemporaries clearly made a distinction between the ordinary and the theatrical; so, then, should historians.

Where ordinary flappers represented a sharp break with social tradition, onstage flappers represented a gradual evolution of a longstanding professional option. Black women were performing and touring onstage both in the US and abroad since the late nineteenth century. Jayna Brown identifies four eras of performance: touring picaninny choruses, variety shows starting with The Creole Show in 1890, the Harlem era marked by the opening of Darktown Follies in 1913, and the “invasion” of Broadway with

Shuffle Along beginning in 1921.89 All of these featured black female performers.

Moreover, some who gained fame as flapper performers – notably Ethel Williams and

Josephine Baker – started their careers as members of picaninny choruses or vaudeville acts. These flapper dancers thus fit into a role already deemed acceptable for women even as they exaggerated the styles and behaviors that drew censure when displayed by ordinary women.

Flappers represented neither the beginning nor the end of this kind of tradition. In the 1910s and 1920s, blueswomen played on their sexuality to sell records. Later, early jazz musicians (both male and female) in Harlem exploited plantation imagery to appeal

88 Ibid., 2 89 Brown, Babylon Girls : Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern, 2. 32 to white audiences.90 The black female body onstage both enabled and mocked racialized stereotypes. White audiences could see a verification of their racist beliefs while a black dancer felt herself to be resisting those same racisms and reclaiming her own body.91

Musicologist Nate Sloan’s work on Harlem jazz clubs emphasizes how early jazz performers balanced reliance on primitivist black stereotypes with a conscious awareness of “class.” Class was, in this sense, a later version of respectability. Sloan argues that performers used “class” to uplift primitivist routines and consciously performed in a way that they knew would be described as having class.92 In all these cases, the artificiality and distance offered by the stage allowed performers to bend the rules of respectable behavior promoted by black leaders. At the same time, knowing that black and white audiences assigned different interpretations to the same performances, savvy performers could use stock characters and stereotypes to effectively appeal to both.

In the Defender, dance in particular illustrates the ways in which black writers considered flapper performers as workers. Many positive reviews focused on dance. For example, a 1922 reviewer rhapsodized over “Liza” as “the fastest dancing show ever seen on Broadway,” comparing it specifically to the previous year’s hit “Shuffle Along.”93

Tony Langston, one of the Defender’s regular theater critics, similarly praised the “world of fast footwork, some of it...of the most sensational sort” in “Shake Your Feet.”94 Fast, skilled dancing was a crucial part of hit performances and could elevate an otherwise middling show.

90 Chapman, Prove It on Me : New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s, chap. 3; Nathaniel Sloan, “Jazz in the Harlem Moment: Performing Race and Place at the Cotton Club” (Stanford University, 2016), chap. 2. 91 Brown, Babylon Girls : Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern, 6–8. 92 Sloan, “Jazz in the Harlem Moment: Performing Race and Place at the Cotton Club,” 7–8. 93 “‘Liza’ Surpasses ‘Shuffle Along As a Dancing Show,’ Chicago Defender December 9, 1922. 94 Tony Langston, “Shake Your Feet a Hit at Grand,” Chicago Defender March 10, 1923. 33

Moreover, writers recognized dance as work. When “Shuffle Along” toured in

New Orleans, reviewer George Daws used the common technique of highlighting the

audience reaction to emphasize the dancers’ skill, recounting how “the audience broke

into applause as the line of ‘ponies’ successfully executed a particularly difficult step.” In

his review of “Bandanna Land,” Langston praised the “clever girls” of the “well drilled”

flapper chorus for supporting the stars “to great advantage.”95 Daws and Langston

understood that the dancing onstage was a result of disciplined effort, which in turn improved the overall quality of the show. Salem Tutt Whitney used similar language to promote his own show, “Come Along Mandy,” encouraging readers to go see the

“bobbed-haired flapper that sings, dances, and comports herself in true artistic style.”96

His appeal to her artistic style is an acknowledgement of the work that goes into a

performance, and it suggests that lay audiences as well as critics understood and

appreciated performers’ discipline. This work separated the onstage flapper chorus from

the frivolous ordinary flapper, who danced merely for her own entertainment. Where

ordinary flappers failed to live up to the high moral standards respectability dictated,

performing flappers were evaluated by a different standard: the work of their art. By this

benchmark, they often succeeded.

Second, contemporaries understood these artists as separate from their characters.

Relying on stereotypes for the benefit of white audiences did not reflect the performers’

underlying moral character. In the Defender, the use of performers’ names and references

to their past work emphasized the person rather than the performance. Writers also

understood the flapper as a “type” that performers used to evoke a certain reaction.

95 Tony Langston, “Bandanna Land Opens at Avenue; Vaudeville at Grand and Morgan,” Chicago Defender, October 14, 1922. 96 Salem Tutt Whitney, Salem Sez, Chicago Defender April 19, 1924. 34

Occasionally this understanding was made explicit, with references to the “flapper type”

appearing in reviews of “Liza” and the high school play “Diogenes Seeks a Secretary.”97

The familiarity of a “type” is also clear in the 1922 review of comedian Flo Lewis’s

flapper imitation: “Flo’s idea of a flapper is the sort of thing that makes cartoonists pay

income tax.”98 In other words, the audience recognized the themes Flo exaggerated for

comic effect because they were already familiar in popular culture depicting the flapper.

Additionally, the audience was familiar with the use of character types in general,

adding another point of remove between the onstage flapper and the woman depicting

her. The Defender’s review of the movie “You Can’t Fool Your Wife” described each of

the three main female characters as a different type – the wife, the siren, and the

flapper.99 Other reviews mentioned tramp types and western tropes.100 Just as flappers

were one small part of a much longer tradition of black female performers, their use as a

type was also part of a tradition. Earlier picaninny choruses and later jazz entertainers

also relied heavily on stereotyped stock characters and themes.101 This meant that audiences could place the flapper into a familiar stage context: a new stock character. As such, she was confined to the stage and did not threaten to upend social norms in the offstage world. This level of artificial safety even applied to amateur theater. Professional actresses and dancers, when they performed as flappers, were held to the standards of their profession. Similarly, when church groups or high schools performed fashion shows

97 Langston, “Liza Surpasses Shuffle Along as a Dancing Show,” 12-9-1922 98 “Bo A Hit,” Defender 7-22-1922 99 “Beauty Types: Leatrice Joy, Nita Naldi and Pauline Garon in "You Can't Fool Your Wife,” Chicago Defender, June 9, 1923. 100 Garfield L. Smith, Jr., “The Douglass,” Chicago Defender, March 1, 1924; “High Brown Flappers,” Chicago Defender, December 10, 1927. 101 Brown, Babylon Girls : Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern, 21-22.; Sloan, “Jazz in the Harlem Moment: Performing Race and Place at the Cotton Club,” 7., 35

or plays that involved a flapper, reporters evaluated those performers as students or

upstanding church members rather than as flappers. Since education and church activity

were pillars of respectability, a temporary, artificial role as a flapper within those

activities was acceptable.

From an audience perspective, enjoying theater could be a respectable pastime.

The Defender featured an entertainment page in every issue, which covered theater both in Chicago and around the country. Given the paper’s general concern with proper conduct, the very existence of the theater page suggests that theater was acceptable.

Several regular contributors to the Defender were themselves theater producers or

performers.102 Such people, of course, had a personal interest in keeping theater

respectable and presenting it as worthwhile entertainment. Nonetheless, having a

platform to promote that view mattered. Readers trusted the Defender as a source for

instruction on proper conduct. Its endorsement of theater likely helped to cement

theater’s respectability, even if the columns written by theater producers started out

merely as an attempt to increase profits. This is not to make a sweeping statement on

Robert Abbott’s personal views; the Defender published dissenting views as well. For

example, a news item on the front page in 1929 snidely remarked that girls earned stage

contracts for “adopt[ing] the style of Eve in the days before she tasted the apple” (that is,

naked) and that this made it “hard to determine whether civilization is moving upwards or

backwards.”103 Yet overall, the Defender’s coverage of theater was consistently positive,

102 Ethan. Michaeli, The Defender : How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America : From the Age of the Pullman Porters to the Age of Obama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016); Woll, Black Musical Theatre : From Coontown to Dreamgirls, 55. 103 “The Week,” Chicago Defender, February 23, 1929. 36

thus contributing to the perception that theater was a worthwhile entertainment for

sophisticated, urban African-Americans.

The Defender reinforced this perception by emphasizing theater’s appeal to average audiences. Reviews often highlighted the most popular songs of a given

performance. A 1927 column about the Indianapolis theater scene focused repeatedly on

the audience reaction rather than the author’s. Ma Rainey’s Paramount Flappers had

enjoyed “the usual Ma Rainey success,” and were followed by a production of “Ginger

Snaps of 1928” in which the cast “[tried] hard to please the public and really seem[ed] to

succeed in doing so.”104 This interest in audience reaction shows up even in theater- related writing that does not focus on specific performances. The “Here and There With

Bob Hayes” column functioned largely as a site for gossip and connection as Hayes compiled performers’ personal news and changes of address. Though it fit neither of these categories, he admiringly mentioned in a 1928 column that the line for Ma Rainey’s recent show had snaked around the block, and that her new song was a hit.105 This

emphasis on audience reaction functioned as a twofold defense of theater. First, tales of

long lines and loud ovations could convince readers that their peers around the country

enjoyed theater. Second, the Defender’s approval reminded readers that this was perfectly

respectable; enjoying theater did not invite moral censure. As with the existence of the

theater page, this defense may have been motivated by profit; even so, its effect was to

promote theater as a popular and respectable activity. This attitude extended to the

flapper, so long as she stayed within the safe limits of the stage.

104 J. Ernest Webb, “Naptown Doings,” Chicago Defender, December 31, 1927. 105 Bob Hayes, Here and There with Bob Hayes, Chicago Defender, October 6, 1928. 37

Conclusion In April 2016, Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and

All That Followed opened at the Music Box Theater. The black flapper returned to

Broadway, and, once again, garnered praise for her snappy dancing.106 The 2016

production combined the songs from the 1921 original with an entirely new book by

director George Wolfe and new choreography by Savion Glover. Critics debated whether

it was a revival or a new musical. Not wanting to compete with smash hit Hamilton at the

Tony Awards, producer Scott Rudin argued that it was a revival.107 Ultimately, the Tony

Award committee classified it as a new musical, and as Rudin feared, Shuffle Along lost

the Best Musical award to Hamilton. Yet Hamilton¸ which casts people of color as

American Founding Fathers, builds on the legacy of the original Shuffle Along, which has

been credited with legitimizing the black musical and ushering in racial integration of

Broadway theaters.108 At the same time, it showed off a captivating chorus of black

flappers.

These performers – who were the main attraction of the original Shuffle –

embodied an acceptable role as stage performers even as they imitated the socially

unacceptable role of flappers. This dichotomy between performers and ordinary flappers

illuminates how respectability and racial uplift provided a framework for writers in the

106 Chris Jones, “‘Shuffle Along’ a dancing knockout with historical depth,” Chicago Tribune, April 28, 2016; Ben Brantley, “Review: ‘Shuffle Along’ Returns to Broadway’s Embrace,” New York Times, April 28, 2016. 107 Michael Paulson, “Eyeing Tonys, ‘Shuffle Along’ Hopes to be Classified as a Revival,” New York Times, April 20, 2016. 108 Woll, 60, 73. 38

Chicago Defender to evaluate and attempt to circumscribe acceptable behavior for young

black women. Throughout the decade, the Chicago Defender sought to appeal to both

middle- and working-class readers while also maintaining and promoting the new

Chicago elite’s middle-class standards. The coverage of the flapper, both on and offstage,

demonstrates this tension. An exciting picture of urban nightlife and freedom attracted

potential migrants and kept newcomers reading the Defender when they arrived, but that

was no excuse for abandoning or even loosening respectable standards.

This tension is revealed in the disapproving but ubiquitous and often humorous

coverage of the flapper. The flapper threatened to abandon her racial duty of motherhood,

endanger her own health, deceive upstanding black men, and substantiate white

stereotypes of black female promiscuity. All of these undermined the project of racial

uplift. The Chicago Defender, with its deep commitment to advancing the Race’s interest, could not condone the flapper’s behavior. However, it was equally impossible to ignore her. The flapper saturated white media, and young black women, many of them

Defender readers, eagerly adopted flapper fashions and identities. The image of the flapper symbolized the modern, urban life many migrants sought, and was the most dramatic embodiment of young women’s new roles as independent workers and participants in a new, unchaperoned youth culture.

The existing discourse of racial uplift and respectability shaped the Chicago

Defender’s response to this exciting and threatening figure. The black flapper posed a specifically racialized threat by failing to adhere to standards of conduct for young black women. In response, the Defender’s critique of the flapper carried a distinctive racial urgency. The acceptance of flappers onstage, which at first glance seems like a loophole 39

in the Defender’s standards, was also shaped by respectability. Onstage, the flapper was merely one type in a long line of characters that often played on stereotypes for the benefit of largely white audiences. Critics’ understanding of the separation between performers and their characters allowed them to place flapper performers in context as workers, as well as to promote theater as one of the many attractions of the urban north while staying within the bounds of respectability. The black flapper, both on and offstage, thus offers a valuable historical window into black middle-class ideology during the Jazz

Age. The Chicago Defender’s preoccupation with the flapper reveals how the black middle class tied its moral identity to the behavior of its young women. As the black flapper tried to dance her way into modernity, she unwillingly carried the weight of her whole race.

40

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