Over-the-shoulder portrait of the writer Anita Loos made by Charles James Fox in New York. With her bobbed hair and sharp sense of humor, Loos was the epitome of the 1920s flapper. View the original source document: WHI 68700

The Wisconsin Historical Society Speakers Bureau offers an exciting opportunity for our historians, curators and authors to visit your community and share the stories of our great state.

Flappers, those young women of the 1920s who scoffed at conventional standards of behavior, threw aside the corsets and burdensome clothes of their mothers for shockingly short, sleeveless, androgynous dresses. Leslie Bellais, former Curator of Social History at the Wisconsin Historical Society, will put the flapper in context of fashion history and illustrate how the flapper style dramatically changed women's clothing.