ABSTRACT
In the opening quotation above, Deborah Parsons underlines the association between certain female images, modernity and the city. But to limit the New Woman or flapper to the confines of the city walls is to underestimate the extent to which she transcended the urban to inhabit the environments of small towns, villages and rural landscapes. If the provincial press is to be believed, the flapper was as much a part of the discourse register in rural Ireland as she was in the urban centres. On 6 March 1926, the west of Ireland based weekly newspaper, the Connacht Tribune, carried an eye-catching headline, ‘Flappers and Shawls’ (p. 6). This referred to a court case against a Galway woman for non-payment of bills. During the proceedings the prosecuting barrister asked if the accused had recently bought her daughter a coat. She said no, to which he replied, ‘What does she put over her blouse, is it a shawl? Very few of the flappers now would be content with a shawl (laughter).’ The reference to a flapper in a Galway courtroom raises a number of questions not only about the prevalence of this modern symbol of womanhood but also about her place in Irish society – rural as well as urban – and her relationship to traditional womanhood. The juxtaposition of the modern fashion icon with the traditional garment of rural Ireland, the shawl, blurs the boundaries between both modernity versus tradition and urban versus rural.
