Quotes from Joshua Zeitz

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.