Why the Flapper Still Matters: Feminist Pedagogy, the Modern Girl, and the Women Artists of the Beaver Hall Group
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The flapper of the 1920s, with her bobbed hair, use of makeup, flashy dress, independent, flamboyant behaviour and eroticism, and love of dancing and jazz music, signified a new form of femininity, one where women were simultaneously modern objects and subjects. This article examines the flapper as a historical, historiographical, and pedagogical problem and addresses the question of why the flapper matters historically and why she should continue to matter to university teachers and researchers. The article dissects the learning experiences of a group of students who toured the 2016 exhibition of the modern art of Montreal’s Beaver Hall Group in conjunction with a fourth-year seminar on the Modern Girl. Students explored a new and diverse visual economy based on a strong, independent, and assertive Canadian feminine modernity, and discovered that images of women could be empowering. I argue that the flapper challenges masculine traditions by encouraging historians to consider changeable feminine bodies and identities, thus breaking down longstanding binaries in Canadian history and historical writing. The flapper points to the use of the historical material in the everyday world. This confluence of women’s history and visual culture suggests why the flapper still matters today.RésuméLa garçonne des années 1920, avec ses cheveux coupés au carré, son maquillage, ses robes clinquantes, son comportement indépendant et flamboyant, son érotisme, de même que son amour pour la danse et la musique jazz, a introduit une nouvelle forme de féminité où les femmes étaient à la fois des objets et des sujets modernes. Cet article examine la garçonne comme un phénomène historique, historiographique et pédagogique. Il s’interroge sur la signification historique de la garçonne et les raisons pour lesquelles elle devrait continuer d’intéresser les professeurs et les chercheurs universitaires. L’article décortique les expériences d’apprentissage d’un groupe d’étudiants qui ont visité l’exposition d’art moderne du Beaver Hall Group de Montréal en 2016, dans le cadre d’un séminaire de quatrième année sur la Fille Moderne. Les étudiants ont exploré une économie visuelle nouvelle et diversifiée basée sur une modernité féminine canadienne forte, indépendante et affirmée, et ont découvert que des images de femmes peuvent être empowering. Je soutiens que la garçonne défie les traditions masculines en encourageant les historiens à considérer des corps et des identités féminines variables, rompant ainsi des binarités établies de longue date dans l’histoire canadienne et l’écriture historique. La garçonne met en valeur l’utilisation de matériel historique dans le quotidien. Cette convergence entre l’histoire des femmes et la culture visuelle indique pourquoi la garçonne demeure pertinente aujourd’hui.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".