Editing Flapper (section)

=== Overturning of Victorian roles ===
Flappers also began working outside the home and challenging women's traditional societal roles and the monolithic historical idea of women being powerless throughout social history.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and other Brazen Performers of the American 1920s|last=Latham|first=Angela J.|publisher=University Press of New England|year=2000|isbn=978-0-8195-6401-6|location=Hanover, NH|pages=7–8}}</ref>

They were considered a significant challenge to traditional [[Victorian era|Victorian]] gender roles, devotion to plain-living, hard work and religion. Increasingly, women discarded old, rigid ideas about roles and embraced consumerism and personal choice, and were often described in terms of representing a "culture war" of old versus new. Flappers also advocated voting and women's rights.

In this manner, flappers were a result of larger social changes – women were able to vote in the United States in 1920, and religious society had been rocked by the [[Scopes trial]].<ref>Zeitz, 2007. "Here was where the modern culture could prove threatening to the Victorians. The ethos of the consumer market glorified not only self-indulgence and satisfaction, but also personal liberty and choice. It invited relativism in all matters ranging from color schemes and bath soap to religion, politics, sex and morality."</ref>

For all the concern about women stepping out of their traditional roles, however, many flappers were not engaged in politics. In fact, older [[suffragette]]s, who fought for the right for women to vote, viewed flappers as vapid and in some ways unworthy of the enfranchisement they had worked so hard to win.<ref>Zeitz, 2007. "Others argued, though, that flappers' laissez-faire attitude was simply a natural progression of feminine liberation, the right having already been won."; p.107: "T[he Jazz Age flapper ... [was] [d]isengaged from politics..."</ref> [[Dorothy Dunbar Bromley]], a noted liberal writer at the time, summed up this dichotomy by describing flappers as "truly modern", "New Style" feminists who "admit that a full life calls for marriage and children" and also "are moved by an inescapable inner compulsion to be individuals in their own right".{{Sfn|Zeitz|2007|p=117}}