Download Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern AudioBook Free
Blithely flinging away the Victorian manners that maintained her disapproving mother corseted, the New Girl of the 1920's puffed smoking cigarettes, snuck gin, hiked her hemlines, danced the Charleston, and necked in roadsters. More important, she earned her own keep, managed her own future, and secured liberties that modern women neglect. Her newfound freedom heralded a radical change in American culture. Whisking us from the Alabama country team where Zelda Sayre first found the eye of F. Scott Fitzgerald to Muncie, Indiana, where would-be flappers begged their moms for silk stockings, to the Manhattan speakeasies where customers partied till daybreak, historian Joshua Zeitz brings the period to exhilarating life. This is the storyline of America's first sexual trend, its first vendors of cool, its first superstars, and its most sparkling advert for the right to pursue contentment. The women and men who made the flapper were a diverse lot. There is Coco Chanel, the French orphan who redefined the womanly form and silhouette, helping to free women from the torturous corsets and crinolines that experienced dished up as tools of interpersonal control. In California, where orange groves provided way to studio lots and fairytale mansions, three of America's first superstars - Clara Bow, Colleen Moore, and Louise Brooks - Hollywood's great flapper triumvirate - terminated the imaginations of millions of filmgoers. Towering most importantly were Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, whose swift ascent and breathtaking fall season embodied the glamour and more than the era that could come with an abrupt end on Black Tuesday, when the currency markets collapsed and rendered the age of plethora and frivolity instantly obsolete. With its heady cocktail of storytelling and big ideas, Flapper is a dazzling look at the women who launched the first truly modern 10 years.
