Full-length illustration of a fashionably dressed flapper standing with one hand on her hip and a cigarette in the other hand.

Flappers were a generation of young Western women in the 1920s who wore short skirts; bobbed their hair; listened to jazz; and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behavior.

Flappers were seen as brash for wearing excessive makeup; drinking; treating sex in a casual manner; smoking; driving automobiles; and otherwise flouting social and sexual norms. Flappers had their origins in the liberal period of the Roaring Twenties; the social; political turbulence and increased transatlantic cultural exchange that followed the end of World War I; as well as the export of American jazz culture to Europe.