The Inkling Volume 3

Time Travelling… Miss Fletcher
talks the Roaring Twenties
By miss fletcher
The glitz and glamour of the 1920s has always enthralled me, and not least
because it’s a heyday for some of the best writers to ever write in the English
language (I’m looking at you Fitzgerald, Woolf, Parker and Hemingway).
Known as the Roaring Twenties, the era sparked revelry and abandon like no
other. WWI was over: the devastating losses renewed a joy for living in the now.
And when better to live? You want to buy that expensive cloche hat – do it. You
want to drink gin cocktails and go dancing – go ahead. You want to speed along
highways in your Ford – put your foot down. There was no time like the present.
This pressing desire to live was fuelled by a boom in industry in America. With
European powers slumping from their efforts on front lines and rebuilding their
war-torn cities and economies, America became an emerging force to be
reckoned with. It had money; it had entrepreneurs; and, more importantly, it
knew how to have fun. The film industry exploded and Jazz riffs spilled out of
clubs, creating an unstoppable wave of glamour and jocundity that can be seen
in the Art Deco creations of Andre Edouard Marty and Horace Taylor.
Yet, it’s not just the cultural explosion of fun that intrigues me; it’s the women
of the period that really make things interesting. Having had a flavour of
independence in the war years, they were no longer content with staying home
and playing the dutiful wife to their husbands. The 1920s shook the tenets of
what it meant to be female: dresses were no longer restrictive, becoming
floatier, shorter and with a dropped waistline which meant that women could
physically move more than they ever could before. Without the tight bodices
and layers of skirts that had encumbered previous generations, they were able
to enjoy new lives. Hair was bobbed in a symbolic gesture of this liberation, too.
Women were out and about enjoying themselves, earning their own money and
flaunting their freedom. As Dorothy Parker stated, ‘She’s not what Grandma
used to be’. I certainly wouldn’t mind rewinding just under one hundred years
to live it up with Parker or Zelda Fitzgerald - who had quite a record of being
banned from hotels for her partying.
Plus, it would mean I could get away with saying things like ‘that dress is the
cat's pyjamas’ and ‘we’re having a whoopee time’. No one does daft slang like
the Twenties does.