Flappers and the Jazz Age

This book offers fascinating new insights into women’s leisure in 1920s-30s Ireland and Northern Ireland. Using a feminist, intersectional lens, it challenges stereotypes of these women's lives as insular and passive, instead presenting more complex images of agentic, pleasure-seeking subjects who were influenced by the international ‘modern girl’. Flappers and the Jazz Age presents intriguing new insights into ordinary women’s lives and leisure in post-partition Ireland. Taking a multidisciplinary and intersectional approach, the book examines diverse sources to explore popular recreational interests in the 1920s and 1930s – including glamour, music, dancing, singing, shopping, reading magazines, travelling, and going to the cinema. In these socially conservative times, modern international cultural influences were deemed morally dubious and were loudly condemned by political and religious leaders both north and south of the border. Indeed, the ‘modern girl’ or ‘flapper’ was typically embroiled in debates about modern nation-building across the world. In the context of the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland, she was also conveniently scapegoated in arguments about modernity and global influence, and traditional social order and gender roles. This edited collection reveals how women across the island of Ireland creatively resisted and negotiated attempts to control their leisure lives. The contributors challenge simplistic perspectives on Irish and Northern Irish women’s lives as insular, instead evidencing the connectedness of their experiences with the wider global context. While acknowledging the reality of economic inequalities, the book reframes the stereotypical construction of women’s lives in the 1920s and 1930s as dull, constricted, and colourless, and rejects the depiction of women as passive victims of social forces. Through a feminist lens, the book produces a lively, complex representation of these women as agentic, pleasure-seeking, fun-loving, playful, and even rebellious subjects that hopefully sparks new scholarship about their experiences. This book foregrounds the everyday lives and leisure practices of people in 1920s–30s Ireland, an area often overlooked in existing scholarship. It examines how identity, recreation, and culture took shape both North and South of the border, with particular attention to women’s lived experiences. Although leisure activities were frequently overshadowed by religious influence and post-partition nation-building projects, many alternative spaces flourished. People danced, sang, listened to music, shopped, embraced glamour, read magazines, swam, travelled, and went to the cinema, participating in trends that connected Ireland to wider international cultures. The book explores these activities through a feminist lens and an intersectional analysis of gender, class, religion, and rural–urban identities. Bringing together perspectives from cultural studies, architecture, geography, fashion, and musicology, it offers new insights and advances understanding of this under-researched dimension of Irish social and cultural history.

Pages: 284, Hardcover, Manchester University Press