Feminism : The New Woman, The Flapper, And The Garconne

The flapper was the harbinger of a radical change in American culture. She was a product of social and political forces that assembled after the First World War. Modernization adjusted the American life. Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern by Joshua Zeitz analyzes the people who created the image of the flapper. This work is an incorporation of narrative, statistics, and scholarly work that provide a distinct insight on the “New Woman.” Joshua Zeitz asserts the flapper was not a dramatic change from traditional American values but reflected the “modern” decade under mass media, celebrity, and consumerism.

People did not like the flappers dresses. They "emphatically rejected the style beginning in the 1920s because it did not show the curves of the female body." Their dress was a "boxy shape that hung straight from the shoulders and fell in an unbroken line just below the knees." This type of dress "looked best on flat-chested, small-hipped androgyne who has come to typify the freewheeling, emancipated, working 'Mew Woman ' of the world." Women were "no longer constrained by corsets and long skirts, nor by the discomfort and time it took to dress oneself in such styles." Their dresses had a "loose cut and shirt hemline [which] allowed women unprecedented freedom of movement." Their freedom of movement allowed them more room to dance up closely to men and change the thoughts on women. (Makela)

A review of the world’s great artists conjures familiar images: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel; Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night; Pablo Picasso’s The Tragedy. There are many more, of course: Monet, Moya, Warhol, Rembrandt, Kandinsky. What is immediately noticeable, however, upon any brief study of art, is the significant absence of women as heralded artists—not only in our ancient pasts, but even today, amongst valiant efforts for gender equality.

Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity was written by Griselda Pollock in 1988, and later published in The Expanding Disclosure in 1992. Griselda Pollock is an art historian, and writes this article for fellow art historians. This is an article written to show the different approaches to femininity in the late 19th century, mainly dealing with the field of art. This article shows how during this time period there were women artists, but due to the gendered ruled ideas attached to art history, these women are largely ignored by art historians. Pollock thought that these women artists are primarily overlooked due to the fact that they are judged by the same standards that are affixed to the work of their male counterparts. But she argues

Some women of the 1920s rebelled against being traditional. These women became known as flappers and impacted the post-war society. People in the 1920’s couldn’t make up their minds about flappers. Some were against them and some were with them. Therefore, some people in the 1920’s loved and idolized flappers, I on the other hand, believed that they were a disgrace to society. These women broke many rules leading young women to rebel against their families.

For my term paper I decided to go to the Cantor Museum in Palo Alto, and I chose to focus on two portraits of women from two distinct time periods. First, I decided on the portrait of Margaret Blagge, Wife of Sidney, 1st Earl of Godolphin. This portrait was painted by the artist Matthew Dixon in 1675, in the Baroque period of art. The portrait of Margaret Blagge was done in England, and it was painted as an oil on canvas. The second artwork I chose to compare was the Portrait of Sally Fairchild by John Singer Sargent. This portrait was done from the year 1884 to 1887 during the Realism movement in art. The portrait of Sally Fairchild was painted in the United States of America, and was painted as an oil on canvas. When comparing these two portraits

Frederick Lewis Allen, in his famous chronicle of the 1920s Only Yesterday, contended that women’s “growing independence” had accelerated a “revolution in manners and morals” in American society (95). The 1920s did bring significant changes to the lives of American women. World War I, industrialization, suffrage, urbanization, and birth control increased women’s economic, political, and sexual freedom. However, with these advances came pressure to conform to powerful but contradictory archetypes. Women were expected to be both flapper and wife, sex object and mother. Furthermore, Hollywood and the emerging “science” of advertising increasingly tied conceptions of femininity to

The purpose of this paper is to analyse and see to what extent women have been depicted within typical stereotypes, how they have been objectified and only seen as a sexual sell, and what consequences and effects these depictions can have on both the female and male audiences. The analysis is over two decades where major social changes underwent. The time after the war, being a housewife and mother was heavily implemented. Whilst after a decade, women started to step away from what was considered the norm, what was considered the ideal life. They started to fight for a better future for themselves, and a life free from their husbands ruling hand. I have chosen visual analysis of magazine front covers as my method because magazines were a major resource for both women and men at the time, it was one of their sources of information about what was going on around them. Front covers often represent the magazine or the audience it is meant for, and

Mary Cassatt is known world-wide for her impressing art in which she focuses mainly in the everyday life of women and children. She is an American artist born in Pennsylvania on May 22, 1844, but later relocates to Europe in 1866 to pursue to work in art. This was mainly due to her family’s and society’s objections to women in the field of art. There she met and befriended famous Impressionist Edgar Degas. Because of her close friendship with Degas, she grew courage to continue to do art in her own way. She continued to paint until she slowly began to lose her eyesight and later died in 1926. Cassatt was part of the Impressionist style movement, in which she painted portraits unlike many others who painted landscapes (biography.com). Her artwork

Have you ever looked at a piece of art and wondered how it could be based on real life, because it was just so beautiful? Well Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun was able to paint in such new and exciting ways; people were left wondering just this. Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun was a woman of many talents. In her life time she came up with new ways of painting, revolutionized fashion in France, and overcame any prejudice thinking because she was a woman. Before dying at the age of eighty-seven, she had gained the respect of women and men all across the world. Being a female artist in the eighteenth century was not easy, especially when you had to keep a career and your life together during the

Judy Chicago (artist, author, feminist and educator) has a career that now spans five decades. In the late 1960s, her inquiry into the history of women began a result of her desire to expose the truth of women’s experiences, both past and present. She still continues on a crusade to change the perception of women from our history, “Women’s history and women’s art need to become part of our cultural and intellectual heritage.” (Chicago, 2011) Through our history women - their struggles, accomplishments and contribution to history, have been overlooked, downplayed and even completely written out of a male dominated society and culture. In anthropologist Sherry Ortner’s 1974 essay “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” she supports this view, writing “…woman is being identified with—or, if you will, seems to be a symbol of—something that every culture devalues,” (Ortner, 1974) Where Mendieta's work primarily came from a striving to belong and an understanding of where she came from, I feel that Chicago's aim was to find a place for all women, past and present in this world, starting with herself in the art world. Chicago did explore her peronal heritage in later works entitled 'Birth Project' and 'Holocaust Project'.

Throughout history many artistic works have been deemed "great" and many individuals have been labeled "masters" of the discipline. The question of who creates art and how is it to be classified as great or greater than another has commonly been addressed by scholars and historians. The last quarter of the 20th century has reexamined these questions based on the assertions that no women artists have ever created or been appreciated to the level of "greatness" that perpetually befalls their male counterparts. The position that society has institutionalized on women as unable to be anything but subordinate and unexpressive is a major contributor to this claim. Giving a brief history of gender discrimination in the art

Gender discrimination is an issue that is ongoing since the colonial times. However, the fight against gender discrimination is not just an issue of the past, but also an issue of the present. In the current 21st century, there are many people who are still fighting for women's equality in society. Women are still getting paid less than men, and are still looked down upon in certain career paths. More action is needed to bring awareness to people about the inequality women still struggle through. More people need to be informed about the inequality women face. Adelaide Labille Guiard’s oil painting in Paris from 1749-1803 called Self Portrait with Two Pupil, served as a propaganda to fight for women’s attendance in the French Academie Royale. It illustrates a self portrait of Guiard, herself, and two of her pupils, Marie Gabrielle and Marie Marguerite Carreaux de Rosemond. In her self portrait, she paints herself in an art studio while her two pupils are by her side. Like Guiard’s self portrait, more effort through social media and the arts

Another area in which women made changes was with their appearance. Women used their attire and style to show an independence, a certain freedom in which they alone had control. Starting with the “Gibson Girl”, women dressed in long, slim dresses, freeing themselves of the poufy petticoats of yore. Women started wearing shorter dresses and shorter hairstyles, leading to “Flapper Jane”. “Women started wearing “less” clothing, shorter dresses, cutting off their hair, and just being more “sensual” than normal”, (Bliven, 1925).

The 1920s was a period of change and reform in many things ranging from entertainment, consumerism, and fashion. Fashion, one of the greatest changes in the 1920s was influenced by designers such as Coco Chanel, Jean Patou, Clara Bow, also known as the “It Girl” all influenced fashion for both women and men in the 20s. Previously, women had to behave polite and modestly and had to wear long dresses down to the ankles. But some women started to go past those social boundaries that were set by society. These women would go to speakeasies and smokes in public. The women who did these things are referred to as flappers. Men and some women saw flappers as a disgrace and were disgusted by their way of living. Slowly, as the years began to pass, women such as Coco Chanel, Jean Patou, and Clara Bow came into the fashion and entertainment industry changing the fashion and women’s ideas.