Book Launch - Flappers and the Jazz Age

Join us to celebrate our new book, Flappers and the Jazz Age: Women and leisure in Ireland, 1920s-30s.

This book develops new insights and understandings about ordinary women’s lives and leisure in Ireland and Northern Ireland in the Jazz Age, which have been neglected in the academic literature to date. Attentive to social differences in women’s lives based on class, religious identities, and rural/urban locations, our intersectional analysis brings together multidisciplinary perspectives including cultural studies, architecture, geography, fashion, and musicology to redress this gap in knowledge. Moreover, the book brings together researchers from both sides of the Irish border into a common dialogue about women’s lives in the 1920s and 1930s.

The collection examines how identity, recreation, and culture took shape both North and South of the border, with particular attention to women's lived experiences. Although leisure activities were frequently overshadowed by religious influences and post-partition nation-building projects, many alternative spaces flourished. People danced, sang, listened to music, shopped, embraced glamour, read magazines, travelled, and went to the cinema. In documenting these activities, we challenge simplistic perspectives on Irish and Northern Irish women’s lives as insular, instead evidencing their connectivity across the border within the island of Ireland and the connectedness of their experiences with the wider global context.

Plan of the event: Arrival from 6.30 with tea/ coffee and biscuits in foyer.

7.00 book launch:

• presentation by the editors Dr Eileen Hogan and Prof Louise Ryan
• Contributions by Rachel Sayers, Public Record Office Northern Ireland
• Professor Leanne McCormick, Ulster University
• Q&A
• Event ends at 8.00pm

To learn more about the book and order a copy, see https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526181794/