by Joshua Zeitz
First published 2009
The 1920s New Woman threw off Victorian constraints and remade America. She smoked cigarettes, drank bootleg liquor, raised her hemlines, and danced until dawn. More crucially, she earned her own money and controlled her fate. Joshua Zeitz traces this cultural transformation from Alabama country clubs where Zelda Sayre met F. Scott Fitzgerald to Indiana towns where girls pleaded for silk stockings to Manhattan speakeasies that never closed. The cast includes Coco Chanel, who freed women from corsets, New Yorker writer Lois Long, who chronicled nightlife as "Lipstick," and Hollywood stars Clara Bow, Colleen Moore, and Louise Brooks. Fashion artist Gordon Conway and cartoonist John Held captured the new spirit in magazines. Advertising pioneers Bruce Barton and Edward Bernays taught businesses to exploit consumer dreams. The Fitzgeralds embodied the era's glamour and excess until Black Tuesday ended the party. Zeitz shows how these women launched America's first sexual revolution and established freedoms modern women inherit.
Genres: history, 20th-century, gender-studies, feminism, biography-memoir, fashion, cultural-studies, american-history
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: cultural-transformation, social-revolution
Setting: Alabama, Indiana, Manhattan, New York
Period: 1920s, Black Tuesday
352 pages · Kindle Edition · Three Rivers Press (CA)