THE FLAPPER
[Dr. Arthur Shadwell, in the Nineteenth Century for January, 1917, in his article on “Ordeal by Fire,” after denouncing idlers and loafers and shirkers, falls foul “above all” of the young girls called flappers, “with high heels, skirts up to their knees and blouses open to the diaphragm, painted, powdered, self-conscious, ogling: ‘Allus adallacked and dizened oot and a ’unting arter the men.’”]
Good Dr. Arthur Shadwell, who lends lustre to a name
Which Dryden in his satires oft endeavoured to defame,
Has lately been discussing in a high-class magazine
The trials that confront us in the year Nineteen Seventeen.
He is not a smooth-tongued prophet; no, he takes a serious view;
We must make tremendous efforts if we’re going to win through;
And though he’s not unhopeful of the issue of the fray
He finds abundant causes for misgiving and dismay.
Our optimistic journals his exasperation fire,
And the idlers and the loafers stimulate his righteous ire;
But it is the flapper chiefly that in his gizzard sticks,
And he’s down upon her failings like a waggon-load of bricks.
She’s ubiquitous in theatres, in rail and ’bus and tram,
She wears her “blouses open down to the diaphragm,”
And, instead of realizing what our men are fighting for,
She’s an orgiastic nuisance who in fact enjoys the War.
It’s a strenuous indictment of our petticoated youth
And contains a large substratum of unpalatable truth;
Our women have been splendid, but the Sun himself has specks,
And the flapper can’t be reckoned as a credit to her sex.
Still it needs to be remembered, to extenuate her crimes,
That these flappers have not always had the very best of times;
And the life that now she’s leading, with no Mentors to restrain,
Is decidedly unhinging to an undeveloped brain.
Then again we only see her when she’s out for play or meals,
And distresses the fastidious by her gestures and her squeals,
But she is not always idle or a decorative drone,
And if she wastes her wages, well, she wastes what is her own.
Still to say that she’s heroic, as some scribes of late have said,
Is unkind as well as foolish, for it only swells her head;
She oughtn’t to be flattered, she requires to be repressed,
Or she’ll grow into a portent and a peril and a pest.
Dr. Shadwell to the Premier makes an eloquent appeal
In firm and drastic fashion with this element to deal;
And ’twould be a real feather in our gifted Cambrian’s cap
If he taught the peccant flapper less flamboyantly to flap.
But, in our way of thinking, ’tis for women, kind and wise,
These neglected scattered units to enrol and mobilize,
Their vagabond activities to curb and concentrate,
And turn the skittish hoyden to a servant of the State.
She’s young; her eyes are dazzled by the glamour of the streets;
She has to learn that life is not all cinemas and sweets;
But given wholesome guidance she may rise to self-control
And earn the right of entry on the Nation’s golden Roll.