The Modern Girl: How Capitalism Sold Us Liberation
By Anna Hebb
The ‘Modern Girl’ was the central icon of the Roaring Twenties. She emerged quite literally worldwide – from Tokyo to Berlin, Shanghai to New York – striding through the decade with her bobbed hair, painted lips, and defiant sense of independence. She worked, danced, smoked and earned her own money; she was daringly visible in public life. To many, she symbolised the dawn of female emancipation after the devastation of the First World War. Yet beneath her image lay the workings of a new economic order. She was not merely a product of social progress, but a creation of consumer capitalism. Manufactured, packaged and distributed through glossy magazines, film screens, and cosmetic advertisements, she reminds us that even freedom itself can be commodified – transformed into something to be bought, displayed and desired.
Advertisers who taught her not only how to see herself, but how to sell herself
Western Worlds: The Flapper
In London and New York, she appeared as the flapper – chain-smoking, jazz-dancing, and flaunting her independence. Her short skirts and even shorter hair successfully scandalised an older generation still haunted by the war and nostalgic for pre-war stability. But her rebellion, so often framed as spontaneous, was in fact carefully mediated through consumer goods. Beauty companies such as Helena Rubinstein and Coty sold liberation through lipstick and perfume, while advertisers for Lucky Strike cigarettes urged women to ‘light up equality’. Hollywood films such as It (1927) turned the flapper’s defiance into an aesthetic dependent on constant consumption. Her freedom was therefore conditional; so vividly projected on the silver screen, the modern girl could only exist through submission to the burgeoning industries that dressed, painted and perfumed her into being.
Berlin’s Neue Frau: Liberation for the Few
Meanwhile, in 1920s Berlin the Neue Frau – ‘new woman’ – became the emblem of Weimar modernity. She cycled, rode trams, sat alone in cafés, and worked in offices, pursuing careers once exclusive to men. Yet her independence was far from universal. Her autonomy depended on access to leisure and income – conditions that excluded working-class women struggling with post-war poverty and inflation. She was a middle-class fantasy: urban, educated, economically privileged. A contained ideal, accessible only to some, she repackaged women’s liberation into a marketable aspiration. Capitalism thus promised autonomy while preserving inequality, reinforcing class divisions even as it appeared to transcend them.
Shanghai: Modeng Xiaojie: Global Glamour
Across the world in Shanghai, the Modeng Xiaojie – quite literally the “Modern Miss” – embodied a new cosmopolitan femininity. She strolled along the Bund in qipao dresses with Western heels, frequented dance halls, and rejected traditional Confucian ideals of female modesty. Her visibility, however, was mediated through the rise of modern print capitalism. Illustrated magazines such as Women’s Pictorial depicted images of powdered faces, painted lips – women who turned the male gaze, back upon itself, transforming the objectifying eye into the object itself. These publications taught women to cultivate beauty as a marker of progress. Beauty brands such as Butterfly Brand sold rouge and silk alongside the promise of modern womanhood itself. The Modeng Xiaojie’s independence, while subverting Confucian patriarchal norms, was engineered by advertisers who taught her not only how to see herself, but how to sell herself.
She embodied social progress and social decline
Tokyo’s Moga: Consuming Modernity
In Tokyo, the Moga (modern girl) represented Japan’s new urban femininity. She styled the bob cut, browsed department stores, pursued office jobs, and spent her earnings of cosmetics and leisure. Japan’s rapid industrialisation gave rise to department stores that framed consumption as a modern necessity. Once again, capitalism positioned cosmetics as both a patriotic duty and a modern necessity. Shiseido’s careful marketing redefined cosmetics from taboo to virtue, recasting makeup as a symbol of hygiene, discipline and self-respect- qualities aligned with the image of a modern nation. The Moga thus embodied a distinctly Japanese fusion of Western modernity and national identity, her self-preservation framed not as vanity but as the very essence of modern womanhood.
The Modern Girl’s story, then, reveals how capitalism learned to transform liberation into a product. She embodied social progress and social decline – freedom entwined with consumption, autonomy mediated by desire. A century later, her image persists in new forms: the influencer, the ‘clean girl’. As we continue to celebrate independence, the Modern Girl reminds us: who truly profits from the taste of our freedom?
Image Credit: Ellen Bernard Thompson Pyle in the 1922 Saturday Evening Post
