Flappers and the Jazz Age - by Eileen Hogan & Louise Ryan (Hardcover)

About the Book

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'.

Book Synopsis

People's ordinary, everyday lives - and more specifically, their leisure activities - are often obscured within existing academic research on 1920s-30s Ireland. This book seeks to redress that neglect by exploring the relationship between identity, recreation, and culture both North and South of the border, with particular attention to women's lived experiences.

Leisurely pursuits during this period were commonly overshadowed by religious influence and the nation-building projects in post-partition Ireland. Nevertheless, there existed alternative spaces, where people enjoyed dancing, singing, listening to music, shopping, glamour, reading magazines, swimming, travelling, and going to the cinema. Such activities reflected international trends beyond national borders.

This book documents those activities and spaces through a feminist lens and intersectional analysis of gender, class, religion and rural/urban identities. It brings together multi-disciplinary perspectives including cultural studies, architecture, geography, fashion, and musicology. In so doing, we present new insights and advance understanding of this under-researched aspect of Irish history.

From the Back Cover

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.

About the Author

Eileen Hogan is Lecturer in Social Policy at the School of Applied Social Studies, University College Cork, Ireland.
Louise Ryan is Senior Professor of Sociology and Director of the Global Diversities and Inequalities Research Centre at London Metropolitan University.