Thanks to historian Dara Howley, we have this nice article from the 2 May 1923 Daily Express by an anonymous flapper on the ethos of flapping:
Why I Flap
By A Flapper
I am a flapper, and I desire to be nothing else. My one terror in life is the thought that the time will come when my skirts will have to be at least two inches longer than they are now, when an equal length of leg — and not bad leg — will be hidden away.
It takes a bold girl to be a flapper — a real one. I know quite well that my skirt agitates the emotions of old ladies, who think to themselves that such abbreviated affairs, thank heaven, were never permitted in their days. I know that my shapely legs are the admiration of pale young City men, and the envy of an ultra aristocratic though rather bony old lady who alights at Kensington. Still — what good would they be to her?
None but such as I really know how to enjoy life, for I make my own pleasure, supply my own excitement, manufacture my own thrills. Where others are bored I am engrossed: in entertaining others I entertain myself. As I go along the streets I am able to select just those who will, having passed me, surreptitiously turn their heads and look back. And why? Not because they are horrified; but because they, having seen, are pleased, and would see again.
Nor ordinary natural man can resist me. I have made it my study not only to attract, but also to hold in bonds that none can break. I am a flapper, a coquette, and every man is my slave. Women hate me — sheer jealousy. Men love me — sheer admiration.
I am not conceited. I admit I am but one of a crowd. There are other flappers who can flap as well as I, and in speaking for myself I speak for them. We are to be envied, but we are also to be pitied.
Life will some day bring to us its sorrows, even as now it brings its joys. But till that time I dwell in the sunshine, I snap my fingers at the future — I flap!
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