24-03-2025
Revisiting Utah's great flapper debate of the 1920s
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.
Some said flappers would turn out smarter and stronger than their foremothers.
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.
Previously in Old News
