Revisiting Utah's great flapper debate of the 1920s
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A century ago this week, SLC flung itself into a heated debate: Were flappers marriage material?
- This is Old News, where we examine the shifting hemlines of Utah's past.
The big picture: The 1920s brought a redefinition in women's roles and ideals, from social mores to fashion.
- Flappers rejected the corsets — real and metaphorical — of yore, delaying marriage in favor of independence, dating and adventure. Skirts and hair became shorter than ever before, and jazz matched dances that showed off women's newly-exposed legs.
What drove the news: The Salt Lake Telegram launched a short essay contest to answer the question, "Should a flapper marry?"
- Hundreds of letters poured in from around the state.
The intrigue: You might expect Utahns' answers to veer toward the pearl-clutching — which some did.
- But, the editors declared, "the contest goes to the flappers."
Losers: The flappers' detractors were, as you'd expect, bitter over men's loss of control over their wives, dismissive of women's value in any sphere outside homemaking — and still PO'd about suffrage.
Winners: The flappers' defenders — many of them men — noted the unfair double-standard that damned young women for doing the same things that young men had always done.
Yes, but: Mostly they thought everyone would be happier if women were allowed to have fun.
- Men wanted fun wives. Kids wanted fun moms. Women and girls just wanted to have fun.
What they said: "I picked out the flappiest flapper in mu' hometown, an' took her seventy-five miles out in the country to help me boss a ranch," wrote one "Sagebrush Sandy" from Delta.
- It was all "a great big game," he said. "Cookin', ridin' range, carin' for a sick puncher, goin' t' a dance, watchin' a perty sunset — all fun an' part o' the game of livin'."
The bottom line: Pour one out for Sagebrush Sandy, Utah's original Wife Guy.
- And another round for Mrs. Sandy, the accidental feminist icon of Delta.