This was the decade of excitement and women held strong participation. In
1921, the year of the first commercial radio broadcast, women were
granted the right to vote in the USA. King Tut's tomb was found in
1922 setting off a world-wide ancient Egypt love affair that manifested
in many areas, including women's fashions especially hats. By 1925, when
the Charleston was invented, flapper fashions hit the scene. It was
the year of Hitler's Mein Kampf and the Scopes Monkey Trial. In
1926, the year A.A. Milne published Winnie-the-Pooh and the year
Harry Houdini died, a woman swam the English channel.
The following year the first talking movie was released, The Jazz
Singer with Al Jolson. Charles Lindbergh flew solo across the
Atlantic Ocean. 1928 was a year of firsts, the first Annual Academy
Awards, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, and the first bubble blown from
bubblegum. The decade ended on an optimistic hope, with the first car
radio invented, but ended in disaster with the St. Valentine's Day
Massacre and the Stock Market crash. The decade was fast and furious
and life would never be the same afterwards. This was a decade for
bobbed hair and smoking in public, not to mention showing your knees.
Body styles were thin and curveless with streamlined hats and
hairstyles. The hair came off and styles were short or pulled back with
ringlets on the forehead and ears.
The bobbed hair of 1922 and beyond
was scandalous, because bob-haired women often smoked. The style itself
was blamed for loose morality, the breakdown of the family, and was
banned from the Royal Court of Queen Mary. The hair dryer was invented,
patterned after the vacuum cleaner, to be followed eventually by the
blow dryer.
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