I heard a radio documentary recently about media coverage of the Flapper craze in the years after the First World War. A lot of it was typical scare sensationalism along the lines that Flappers' short skirts would make them infertile or their short hair would make them prone to sunstroke, etc. The documentary makers argued that nothing the media reported could be true because Western Society did not collapse. This ignores the fact that while the Flappers were highly visible, there were not really that many of them. For the vast majority of women in Europe and North America life was poor and filled with drudgery. The documentary makers were obviously from the chattering classes which provided the bulk of the Flapper population. These are the same people who celebrated the Sufferagettes for the British 1918 Election Act which enfranchised some women. No mention of the women who laboured in the factories throughout the First World War as contributors to gaining the vote or that the same act gave a large number of previously non-enfranchised men the vote too. Nor was there much of a look at whether the Sufferagettes with their terrorist campaign, it wasn't their fault that they failed to kill anyone one, may have actually set the campaign for female enfranchisement back by several years. No Government likes to be seen to be giving in to terrorists.