Searching for the Modern Girl: Flappers and Bright Young Things Around the World 1920s–40s
While the Bright Young Things of England and the flappers of the America remain fixed in cultural memory, their incarnations elsewhere around the world have all but disappeared from history. Affiliation with a feminized Anglo-European metropole may have contributed to their invisibility in the colonial peripheries, constructed around paradigms of masculine nationhood or anxious to distinguish themselves from Anglo-European mass culture. Despite her iconic status in the interwar period, the stigma associated with this notorious female figure in her own time seems to have carried over into the academy, inhibiting serious critical analysis of her role and function as an image for modernity.