SSR 2. Week 7. (group)

 

Woman and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs

Written by Billie Melman.

By Sarah Burke

Complete citation:

Melman, Billie. Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs. St. Martin's Press, 1988.

Fig. 1. Front cover of Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs.

Image Credit:

“Prof. Bihla Melman.” Tel Aviv University, 2020, https://english.tau.ac.il/profile/bmelman#anchor_publications.

Key Words: Class, gender, flapper, superfluous, women’s suffrage, sex wars, sex books, periodicals, Britain, politics. 

Brief Overview:

            The author of Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs is Billie Melman, an Israeli Historian.  The book looks at the attitudes of women after the First World War, and how literature was used to maintain the direction of feminine virtues based on political, cultural, and economic ideologies of Britain between 1918 – 1928.

Summary of key points:

In the Introduction the author Billie Melman gives the background context as to why the decade 1918 – 1928 in Britain are represented in this book.  She discusses both the ‘Matron Vote,’ and the ‘Flappers Vote,’ explaining how the introduction of women’s reforms was two-fold: One, to gain the economic benefits of a demographic who were attempting to represent women’s suffrage by living independent of marriage based ideologies, and two, as a way to continue to intervene in the social status, and welfare of females.

Part One of the book discusses how opinions were held, manipulated, and distributed by the newspaper monopoly of Rothemere Press at the end of The Great War, when men were returning home, and displacing women from their jobs, and their newly found freedoms.  Having both political and financial motivations, the Rothemere press often crusaded against woman’s suffrage buy using the terms “Superfluous,’ and ‘Flapper’ as derogatory discourse. 

Part Two is a topic around the control of women reforms being juxtaposed by the rise of ‘best-sellers,’ a term taken from America to Britain to represent the rise of sex books.  Books written by women for women, removing the romantic ideals of marriage and home life into a realm of decadence that excluded men.  Books though, were still expensive to purchase, so the creation of paperbacks, of which had a magazine like quality, opened the door to the printing of periodicals, and ultimately drove down the costs of books.

Part Three analyses, and reflects on various women’s magazines, their publishers, editors, and the readership that they were seeking to gain.  Thirteen different weeklies are analysed, and at the end of the book there is also an extensive list of other women focused magazines that the reader can research beyond the book. The magazine boom during the inter-war period was not just a result of escapism from the traumas of war, and the depression.  It was also a way to influence the politics around class and gender in an economical way.  

The author concludes by gathering all evidence into a single idea that literature printed during the inter-war period caricatured female themes and motifs of suffrage, and relegated them back into the imagination of the mind.

Important Quotations:

“The outside world - economic, destructively competitive and political – is masculine.  The domestic space is a buffer against the corrupting influences of life in urban industrial society.” […] “Carried to its logical conclusion it meant that reform, indeed any change in the position of women, was useless and impracticable, and that conclusion was to become the basis of organised opposition to female suffrage.” (4)

“In the eyes of the contemporaries, a society in which fertile females were plentiful and males were scarce was politically, socially and morally imperiled.” (18)

“’Superfluous’ is a conveniently equivocal epithet indicating something excessive or superabundant.” (19)

“Literally ‘flapper’ means something that slaps or strikes.” (27)

“They became ‘umbrella’ pejoratives, so resilient and all embracing that they covered multiple and diverse images and meanings: the image of adolescent purity and juvenile deviance; asexuality and hyper-sexuality; feminine independence and superfluity; social order and subversion.” (36)

‘Secondly, all the publisher and the majority of advertisers, editors and writers of women’s magazines were men. Despite all this, the periodical press was popularly described as a feminine domain.” (110)

“Yet the break from the notion of a defined feminine sphere, and the aesthetic conventions of domestic fiction was incomplete, because largely confined to fantasy.  Social and sexual freedoms were displaced into imaginary or Utopian societies, and the ‘new freedom’ or ‘new license’ dissociated from the mundane and the familiar.” (150)

Usefulness to our group topic or individual project:

            This book is useful as it describes a class and gender war that came from the ending of the First World War.  Wars may be fought on paper, and the subliminal narratives in some magazines printed during the inter-war period reflected how Nations often used literature as political subterfuge.