1 Ryan, Louise (2002) Flappers and shawls: the female embodiment of Irish National Identity in the 1920s. In: Women as sites of culture: women's roles in cultural formation from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Shifrin, Susan, ed. Ashgate, Aldershot. ISBN 9780754603115 Flappers and Shawls: the female embodiment of Irish national identity in the 1920s Louise Ryan, The Modern Girl (extract) Her feet are so very little Her hands are so very white Her jewels so very heavy And her head so very light Her colour is made of cosmetics - Though this she’ll never own Her body is mostly cotton, And her heart is wholly stone. She falls in love with a fellow, who smells with a foreign air; He marries her for her money, They are a well-matched pair. (1) Introduction: In the newly established Irish Free State of the 1920s, the flapper or ‘modern girl’ was a highly contested and deeply controversial symbol of womanhood (2). Within ‘Irish Ireland’ nationalism and Catholic discourses the modern girl represented disobedience, vice, immorality and was ultimately constructed as unIrish, foreign and pagan. Her embodiment of foreign fashions and lifestyles threatened to destabilise Irish identity and thus undermine the new nation. National daily newspapers published in Dublin, the capital city, regularly reported concerns about flappers. But such accounts tended to locate modern, fashionable, independent young women in urban centres (3). These configurations suggest interwoven gendered dichotomies of urban versus rural, modern versus traditional, sinful versus virtue. This chapter engages with these dichotomies by examining representations of the archetypal flapper/ modern girl in the provincial press in the southern Irish Free State in the mid to late 1920s. This previously neglected area of inquiry will raise questions about not only the prevalence of the flapper archetype in rural Ireland but also the construction of this symbol of womanhood in the context of Irish cultural and national identity. Press representations are complex and multifaceted; advertisements, women’s pages and feature articles indicate the range and diversity of perspectives that simultaneously celebrated and condemned women’s independence and modernity.