The Flappers

The term flapper in the 1920s referred to a "new breed" of young women who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to what was then considered unconventional music and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered "decent" behaviour.

The flappers were seen as brash in their time for wearing excessive makeup, drinking hard liquor, treating sex in a more casual manner, smoking cigarettes, driving automobiles, and otherwise flouting conventional social and sexual norms.

The term flapper first appears in Britain, though the etymology is disputed. It may be in reference to a young bird flapping its wings while learning to fly, or it may derive from an earlier use in northern England of flapper to mean "teenage girl" (whose hair is not yet put up), or "prostitute".
While many in the United States assumed at the time that the term flapper derived from a fashion of wearing galoshes unbuckled so that they could show people their bodies as they walked, the term was already documented as in use in the United Kingdom as early as 1912.
From the 1910s into the 1920s, flapper was a term for any impetuous teenage girl, often including women under 30.

Only in the 1920s did the term take on the meaning of the flapper generation style and attitudes, while people continued to use the word to mean immature.
Flappers went to jazz clubs at night where they danced provocatively, smoked cigarettes through long holders, and dated.
They rode bicycles and drove cars.
They drank alcohol openly, a defiant act in the period of Prohibition.
Flappers also wore "kissproof" lipstick and a lot of heavy makeup with beaded necklaces and bracelets.
They liked to cut their hair into "boyish" bobs, often dyeing it jet-black.

Despite its popularity, the flapper lifestyle and look could not survive the Great Depression. The high-spirited attitude and hedonism simply could not find a place amid the economic hardships of the 1930s. More specifically, this decade brought out a conservative reaction and a religious revival which set out to eradicate the liberal lifestyles and fashions of the 1920s.
In many ways, though, the self-reliant flapper had allowed the modern woman to make herself an integral and lasting part of the Western World.