Jail For Bare-Kneed Flappers
Via Bondage Blog comes word that in 1921 they were jailing flappers for not rolling up their stockings properly:
The full story, of course, is more complicated and interesting. The clippings above appeared in The Jacksonian in Cimerron, Kansas, but according to additional press accounts summarized in Posing A Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen Performers by Angela J. Latham, the woman in question was a resident of Los Angeles, arrested in Atlantic City after wrangling physically and by all accounts rather successfully with a beach cop who took issue with (among other things) her bathing attire. Her name was Louise Rosine and she was described as looking “as powerful as Jack Dempsey.” She further expressed her contempt for local attitudes about body nudity by disrobing entirely once she arrived in jail, forcing the jail authorities to defend themselves from her body presence by pinning up sheets in front of her cell.
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I love this story; I wonder whatever happened to her. Sounds like quite a woman
Me too; I paged through the linked book on Google Books but it was more interested in academic minutia and left her story with her still sitting in jail. Since she beat up a cop pretty thoroughly, I imagine she did a year or two in a New Jersey women’s prison, but it would be nice to know.
According to this page (http://xroads.v....html) her story was covered by the New York Times (http://xroads.v...2.pdf), so there might be other coverage of her.
There certainly is, but access to searchable news archives from that era that you don’t have to pay for is hard to come by without an academic affiliation or access to a good urban library. There are dribs and drabs, but it’s a lot of effort for very sporadic coverage.
[…] of you were fascinated by the tale of poor Louise Rosine, jailed in Atlantic City in 1921 for failing to cover her knees on the beach and for having a bad […]