Why the Flapper Still Matters: Feminist Pedagogy, the Modern Girl, and the Women Artists of the Beaver Hall Group

The author points out that the flapper of the 1920s, with her bobbed hair, use of makeup, flashy dress, independent, flamboyant behaviour and eroticism, and love of dancing and jazz music, signified a new form of femininity, one where women were simultaneously modern objects and subjects. The author examines the flapper as a historical, historiographical, and pedagogical problem and addresses the question of why the flapper matters historically and why she should continue to matter to university teachers and researchers. She dissects the learning experiences of a group of students who toured the 2016 exhibition of the modern art of Montreal’s Beaver Hall Group in conjunction with a fourth-year seminar on the Modern Girl. She recounts that the students explored a new and diverse visual economy based on a strong, independent, and assertive Canadian feminine modernity, and discovered that images of women could be empowering. The author argues that the flapper challenges masculine traditions by encouraging historians to consider changeable feminine bodies and identities, thus breaking down longstanding binaries in Canadian history and historical writing. She concludes that the flapper points to the use of the historical material in the everyday world, and this confluence of women’s history and visual culture suggests why the flapper still matters today.

Historical Studies in Education/Revue d'histoire de l'éducation

Vol. 29

no. 2

113-135

Fall 2017

en