The Black Flapper's Challenge To

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.

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