flappers

Cultural  

1. A nickname given to young women in the 1920s who defied convention by refusing to use corsets, cutting their hair short, and wearing short skirts, as well as by behavior such as drinking and smoking in public. (See Jazz Age and Roaring Twenties.)

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Example Sentences

To replicate the columnar formations of birds, in which they line up one directly behind the other, the researchers created mechanized flappers that act like birds' wings.

From Science Daily • Apr. 25, 2024

In what ways were flappers a reaction to World War I?

From Textbooks • Dec. 14, 2022

Lurking behind the era’s glitzy flappers and Wall Street speculators was a collective trauma of both the war and the pandemic.

From Washington Post • Nov. 13, 2022

Sibling chorus girls go to Paris and live like their mother and aunt who were 1920s flappers.

From Los Angeles Times • Apr. 17, 2020

When we went in, the room was already crowded—babies, children of all ages, and women of all kinds: nuns, spike-heeled flappers, lame grandmothers, fat mothers and thin ones, brave ones and sniffling ones.

From "Homesick" by Jean Fritz