Joshua Zeitz > Quotes

“(…) the New Woman of the 1920s boldly asserted her right to dance, drink, smoke, and date—to work her own property, to live free of the strictures that governed her mother’s generation. (…) She flouted Victorian-era conventions and scandalized her parents. In many ways, she controlled her own destiny.”
― Joshua Zeitz, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern

“(...)"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.”
― Joshua Zeitz, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern

“A study of fifty women conducted in 1887 revealed that the corset forcibly contracted their waists by anywhere between two and a half and six bodies. The pressure it applied to women's bodies averaged twenty-one pounds but could reach as high as eighty-eight pounds. Tight-lacing was thus akin to crushing oneself slowly from all sides. As a harsh critic of the corset noted, 'It is evident, physiologically, that air is the pabulum of life, and that the effects of a tight cord round the neck and of tight-lacing only differ in degree.... for the strangulations are both fatal. To wear tight stays is in many cases to wither, to waste and to die.”
― Joshua Zeitz, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern

“We are our own sculptors...Who can deny that passion and unkind thoughts show on the lines and expressions of our faces...young people seldom have these vices until they start getting old, so I love to be with them.”
― Joshua Zeitz

“Smaller families also created a narrower age gap between first- and last-born children; this trend, in turn, meant that children shared more in common with one another than with their parents.”
― Joshua Zeitz, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern

“These are trying times,' Samuel Piper of the 158th Pennsylvania wrote to his wife, 'and we should all humble ourselves and try to live as we should and as we will wish we should have done when we come to die. We should live always with God before our eyes and endeavor to serve him continually. At best our days are few and evil, and we should live agreeable in this world so that we may be better prepared to enjoy our heavenly home above; a few days, weeks, months or years at farthest we will be called upon to leave our earthly home and if we live right the days allotted to us here below the change will be a good one. If not it will certainly be a very bad one.”
― Joshua Zeitz, Lincoln's God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation

“And in a world where individuals felt their vote counted little either in the political arena or the workplace, they could at least demonstrate authority over their own bodies.”
― Joshua Zeitz, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern