Modern women on trial: sexual transgression in the age of the flapper

Focusing on a number of sensational trials with young female defendants involving drugs, murder, adultery, miscegenation and sexual perversion in the period 1918-1924, the books suggests that the figure of the modern woman/flapper was a personification of the upheavals of the time, representing anxieties about modernity, and instabilities of gender, class, race and national identity. Later she came to stand for the ‘roaring’ 1920s, but in the period immediately after the Great War she represented not only newness and hedonism, but also a frightening, uncertain future.