Modern women on trial: Sexual transgression in the age of the flapper (Gender in History)

Modern women on trial looks at the highly publicised, sensational trials of several young female protagonists in the period 1918-24. These cases, all presented by the press as morality tales involving drugs, murder, adultery, miscegenation and sexual perversion, are used as a prism through which to identify concerns about modern femininity. There is a growing historiography on women and the First World War and interwar period, but this book uniquely places a series of virtually co-terminous trials and their reportage alongside each other so as to decipher the cultural work performed in relation to anxieties about the modern woman just after the Great War. Men, already mentally and physically scarred by war, returned to the humiliation of high unemployment; women, having gained greater independence and skills, were now frustratingly expected to resume prewar work and conventional gender relations. There was particular resentment by men of the 'pleasure-seeking' attitude that women seemed to have acquired. The flapper, which later became closely associated with the 'roaring' 1920s, was a personification of the upheavals of the time, embodying fears and anxieties about modernity, and instabilities of gender, class, race, and national identity. In the period immediately after the Great War, these modern women represented not only newness and hedonism, but also a frightening, uncertain future. This accessible, informative and extensively researched book will be of interest to all those interested in social, cultural or gender history.