In 1919, the French poet and intellectual, Paul Valery, wrote two letters in which he contemplated the end of the Great War. In his website, The History Guide, Steven Kreis noted that these famous letters were actually of English origin: “The Crisis of the...
The New Woman needed new clothes. Once they had shortened their skirts and worn trousers women would refuse to be immobilized again. But after the Great War, she literally had nothing to wear and an entirely new wardrobe was invented in a period of a very few years....
She was called the “Flapper” and was known as the New Woman. A product of the Great War, she was of the new generation of women who had been liberated from the past but the upheavals of the War. Her first act of assertion had been to take over the jobs of men, absent...
The New Woman and her counterpart, the New Man, were post-war products of a decade of many names. The 1920s were The Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, and Les Années folles, the crazy years. Each name has a slightly different connotation: the Jazz Age is obviously about...
The new woman, who debuted after the Great War had a prewar predecessor. Irene Castle (1893-1969) and American ballroom dancer who performed with her husband Vernon, found that long hair was hot and heavy and incompatible to the athleticism of dancing. In 1915, she...
Looking back, one can say that the Great War merely accelerated an ongoing trend in female fashion. Women, particularly younger women, were rejecting the constraining clothing that prevented them from playing tennis with comfort, going swimming without being drowned...
