Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation by Judith Mackrell
444 pages
Published 2013
Read from February 16 to February 26
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Ordinarily I begin to lose interest in history around AD 1750, but there are intervals here and there when cultural and circumstantial elements unite to entice me. It's no surprise that the 1920s are one such period, an interbellum decade of experimentation and loosened parameters that invited sexual and gender upheaval, and the sort of fashionable pretense of intellectualism that's been popular with wealthy urban youth ever since. Flappers approaches the decade through the biographies of six women -- Josephine Baker, Tallulah Bankhead, Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Zelda Fitzgerald, Tamara de Lempicka -- who, in Mackrell's words, illustrate the new sense of "self-determination" and "recklessness," "created by a spirit of emancipation that had been fermenting since the beginning of the century" as well as the "social derailment" of the First World War. Mackrell's analysis tends toward the just-so story, lifelong tendencies fomented, pop psychology style, by particular deprivations or experiences in childhood. But she tells an outstanding story, her prose understated and absorbing, and while cramming six biographies into one volume may make for superficiality, the end result is a fascinating read.
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