The Image of "Flapper" and Its Change in American Culture in the 1930s

Research Project

Project/Area Number	13610556
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Section	一般
Research Field	英語・英米文学
Research Institution	The University of Tokyo
Principal Investigator	HIRAISHI Takaki The University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, Professor, 大学院・人文社会系研究科, 教授 (10133323)
Project Period (FY)	2001 – 2002
Project Status	Completed (Fiscal Year 2002)
Budget Amount *help	¥3,100,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,100,000) Fiscal Year 2002: ¥1,200,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,200,000) Fiscal Year 2001: ¥1,900,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,900,000)
Keywords	American Culture / The 1930s / Flapper
Research Abstract	The word "flapper," once popular in the 1920s, disappeared almost completely with the advent of the age of Depression in the 1930s ; but when one looks into the ways of life of women who were once called flappers, one finds how these ex-flappers were looking for their independence and trying to do their own social activities, as in the case of actress Joan Crawford, who represented charming flappers in the twenties and then played many women of social activities, and in the case of author Margaret Mitchell, also an ex-flapper, whose famous Gone with the Wind featured a woman protagonist who survived the war and its aftermath by her own strenuous efforts. On the other hand, however, independent and active women are found in the U.S. to be following their ancestors in the 19th century and after, who showed so-called the frontier spirit of their own sex, as it were. Women's frontier spirit are typically seen in Willa Cather's novels like O Pioneers and My Antonia, written in the 1910s, and in Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground published in 1925. and also in Western movies that felt it necessary in the 1930s to have in them active women surviving with equal strength with men, as one sees in The Virginian, the classical work with a courageous "schoolmarm" as a protagonist, which was repeatedly made into film. One thus recognizes the important roles of women in the formation of predominant trends of culture in the U.S., from the moralistic twenties in which they rejected flappers, to the stout thirties in which they destroyed the time-worn image of the flapper to establish a new image of the active woman of independence.