Table Of ContentWOMEN AND THE POPULAR IMAGINATION IN THE
TWENTIES
Women and the Popular
Imagination in the
Twenties
Flappers and Nymphs
Billie Melman
Lecturer in Modern History
Tel-Aviv University
M
MACMILLAN
PRESS
©Billie Melman 1988
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1988 978-0-333-39195-2
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First published 1988
Published by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG212XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Melman, Billie
Women and the popular imagination in the twenties:
flappers and nymphs.
1. English fiction-20th century-History and
criticism 2. Popular literature-History and
criticism 3. Women in literature
!.Title
823' .912'09352042 PR888.W6
ISBN 978-1-349-19101-7 ISBN 978-1-349-19099-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-19099-7
For Yossi and for Yo tam, who was conceived and born with this book
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
List of Abbreviations
X
Introduction: I9I8-28, Contexts and Texts I
PART ONE THE IDIOM THAT THE GENERAL
PUBLIC POSSESSES'
I The Superfluous Woman, the Flapper, the Disfranchised
Female and the Rothermere Press IS
PART TWO 'FURTIVE EXCITEMENT: THE
DISCOURSE IN BEST -SELLERS
2 'Sex Novels': A New Kind of Best-seller 4I
3 I92I: If Winter Comes-A 'Masculine' Novel 52
4 I924: The Green Hat 65
5 I924, Annus Mirabilis: The Constant Nymph 76
6 19I 9-28: The Sheik of Araby'-Freedom in Captivity
in the Desert Romance 89
PARTTHREE REALISTIC FANTASIES: THE WORLD
OF THE STORY PAPERS
7 Class and Gender: The 'Girls' Weeklies' 107
8 'A Lass of Lancashire': The Mill Girl as Emblem of
Working-Class Virtues 121
9 The Emigrant: Romance and the Empire 134
vii
viii Contents
Conclusion 145
Appendixes 152
(A) Best-selling Authors: Biographical Notes 152
(B) Margaret Kennedy on The Constant Nymph 153
(C) Women's Story Papers, 1919-30: A Check List of
Fiction Magazines with 'Feminine' Interest 156
Notes 164
Select Bibliography 178
Index 188
Acknowledgements
I am particularly indebted to Professor John A. Sutherland, of the
California Institute of Technology, formerly of University College,
London, a rare combination of patient instructor and scrupulous critic,
whose advice and guidance have, I hope, benefited my work. Dr David
Trotter of University College, most careful of readers, has shown interest
in this book from its inception and went over the final draft.
There are others, individuals and institutions, to whom I am indebted
in many different ways. Professor Walter Laqueur of the Institute of
Contemporary History and Georgetown University; Professor Saul
Friedlander of the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva and
Tel-Aviv University; Professor James Joll and Professor Elie Kedourie of
the London School of Economics; Ms Victoria Glendinning; Mr Terence
DeVere White; Ms Julia Birley, daughter of the late Margaret Kennedy,
who allowed me to look at unpublished material and quote from it;
Professor Zvi Yavetz of the Department of History, Tel-Aviv University;
the Fred Lessing Foundation; the Aranne School of History, Tel-Aviv
University; the Staff of the London Library; Mr David Doughan and Miss
Katherine Ireland of the Fawcett Library; Miss Kathleen Hays of the
Newspaper Library at Colindale; Miss Mary Hurworth of the Reading
Room at the British Library; the staff of the British Library at Woolwich;
Ms Christa Wichtmann; Mrs Jacky Carby; Mrs Perlina Varon, for her
dedication; and last, but first, my parents, Glila and Samuel Rosencweig.
London and Tel-Aviv B.M.
ix
List of Abbreviations
AP Amalgamated Press
GF Girls' Friend
GFL Girls' Friend Library
HMSO Her Majesty's Stationery Office
JBA Julia Birley Archive
MN Mizpah Novels
NYTBR New York Times Book Review
TLS The Times Literary Supplement
vs
Victorian Studies
WWL Woman's World Library
Early issues of the GFL, MN and the WWL carry no dates. Only a
probable year of publication can therefore be cited, allowing for a lapse
between the issue of a number and its stamping in the British Library.
X
Introduction
1918-28, Contexts and Texts
A decade, to repeat a truism, is not a fact. It is an arbitrary measurement of
time, retrospectively imposed upon events in the past by the tidy-minded
student of history. It is at the peril of being accused of tidy-mindedness, as
well as of a distorting reading of the past, that I use the terms 'decade' and
the 'twenties'. They are interchangeably applied in this book to the
continuum between two spots in time, 6 February 1918 and 29 March
1928.1 On the first date the last of the four Reform Bills became law and
13,671,480 electors, the biggest increase ever in Britain's electorate, were
added to the Parliamentary Register.2 The new Representation of the
People Act extended the franchise to males over 21 years and to females
over 30 years who (except when they qualified in their own right) were
the wives of local-government electors. The 'matrons' vote' - as it was
appropriately labelled -was, essentially, a household suffrage. A residue
of some 5.5 million females remained voteless until, about ten years later,
an almost undivided House of Commons passed the Representation of
the People Equal Franchise Bill. During the interim the disfranchised
female haunted the popular imagination. She was distinguished from the
rest of her sex, marked out and labelled 'flapper', a curious epithet that,
after three centuries of near obscurity, suddenly acquired life and
meaning. And universal female suffrage, which met no serious political
opposition, popularly became known as the 'flapper vote'. The epithet
had a significance beyond its literal meaning and specific political
connection. It conjured up an ambiguous and historically peculiar image
of the young woman. And, in the image itself and various others
associated with it, there co-existed diverse and contradictory notions on
the female as androgyne, a figure characterised as sexless but libidinous;
infantile but precocious; self-sufficient but demographically, economically
and socially superfluous; an emblem of modern times yet, at the same
time, an incarnation of the eternal Eve. The equivocal figure became the
centre of a polyphonic debate of many voices, simultaneously carried on
on various platforms. Orchestrated by the mass-circulation newspapers of
the Harmsworth brothers, the debate was to reverberate, through the
decade, in popular novels and in the mammoth body of pulp magazines.
In its scope and intensity it surpassed earlier discussions on women and
sexuality. At certain points and on certain platforms, obsession with the
1
