Flappers and the Jazz Age : Women and leisure in Ireland, 1920s–30s

This book offers fascinating new insights into women’s leisure in 1920s-30s Ireland and Northern Ireland. Using a feminist, intersectional lens, it challenges stereotypes of these women's lives as insular and passive, instead presenting more complex images of agentic, pleasure-seeking subjects who were influenced by the international ‘modern girl’. -- .

This book foregrounds the everyday lives and leisure practices of people in 1920s–30s Ireland, an area often overlooked in existing scholarship. It 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 influence and post-partition nation-building projects, many alternative spaces flourished. People danced, sang, listened to music, shopped, embraced glamour, read magazines, swam, travelled, and went to the cinema, participating in trends that connected Ireland to wider international cultures. The book explores these activities through a feminist lens and an intersectional analysis of gender, class, religion, and rural–urban identities. Bringing together perspectives from cultural studies, architecture, geography, fashion, and musicology, it offers new insights and advances understanding of this under-researched dimension of Irish social and cultural history. -- .