Joshua Zeitz Quotes & Sayings

( ... ) 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. — Joshua Zeitz

A study of fifty women conducted in 1887 revealed that the corset forcibly contracted their waists by anywhere between two and a half and six bodies. The pressure it applied to women's bodies averaged twenty-one pounds but could reach as high as eighty-eight pounds. Tight-lacing was thus akin to crushing oneself slowly from all sides. As a harsh critic of the corset noted, 'It is evident, physiologically, that air is the pabulum of life, and that the effects of a tight cord round the neck and of tight-lacing only differ in degree ... for the strangulations are both fatal. To wear tight stays is in many cases to wither, to waste and to die. — Joshua Zeitz

( ... )"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. — Joshua Zeitz