From the Introduction...

An early reference in Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defined the flapper as “A young girl, esp. one somewhat daring in conduct, speech and dress,” a designation that at least one eighteen-year-old woman in 1922 seemed ready to embrace. “Of all the things that flappers don't like,” she boldly explained to readers of The New York Times Book Review and Magazine, “it is the commonplace.”

If historians still disagree about how and when the term came into vogue, by the early 1920s it seemed that every social ill in America could be attributed to the “flapper”--the notorious character type who bobbed her hair, smoked cigarettes, drank gin, sported short skirts, and passed her evenings in steamy jazz clubs, where she danced in a shockingly immodest fashion with a revolving cast of male suitors. She was the envy of teenage girls everywhere and the scourge of good character and morals. Nobody could escape the intense dialogue over the flapper. “Concern--and consternation--about the flapper are general,” observed a popular newspaper columnist of the day. “She disports herself flagrantly in the public eye, and there is no keeping her out of grownup company or conversation. Roughly, the world is divided into those who delight in her, those who fear her and those who try pathetically to take her as a matter of course.”