In researching a book on the 1920s flapper—the notorious character type who bobbed her hair, smoked cigarettes, drank gin, sported short skirts, and passed her evenings in steamy jazz clubs, where she danced in a shockingly immodest fashion with a revolving cast of male suitors—I was surprised to discover how familiar America’s Jazz Age seems to the modern eye.

In late 1924 the husband-and-wife sociologist team of Robert and Helen Lynd embarked for Muncie, Indiana, where they began a yearlong study of a “typical” American city. What they found could easily describe the typical American suburb in 2006. Teenagers were in the thrall of fashion and celebrity. Young girls fought with their mothers over the length of their skirts and the amount of makeup applied to their faces. Boys argued with their fathers over the use of the family car.

Public culture in the 1920s was suffused with sexual imagery, as ordinary Midwesterners rushed to buy up real-life glossies like True Confessions , Telling Tales , True Story , and Flapper Experiences , which ran stories with such lurid headlines as indolent kisses and the primitive lover (“She wanted a caveman husband”). Advertisements featuring scantily dressed Egyptian women guaranteed the “beauty secret of Cleopatra hidden in every cake” of Palmolive soap. Popular songs of the era included “Hot Lips,” “I Need Lovin’,” and “Burning Kisses.”

In effect, the 1920s heralded America’s entry into the modern era. It was the first decade when the nation came under the full influence of advertising, consumer culture, movies, and radio. In a new world that was defined more by the city than the farm, Americans responded with enthusiasm to the promise of abundance and leisure. Their new watchword was fun; their new goal, fulfillment; their new obsession, sex.

If fun was the watchword of the younger generation, so was choice. Living in a world increasingly dominated by magazine ads for makeup, furniture, and clothing, many Americans began applying the idea of the free market in surprising contexts. A news item dated August 1923 brilliantly captured the tensions that the country’s new consumer dogma could inspire.

“This little city of Somerset [Pennsylvania] has been somersaulted into a style class war,” reported The New York Times , “with the bobbed hair, lip-stick flappers arrayed on one side and their sisters of long tresses and silkless stockings on the other.” When the local high school PTA convened to endorse a new dress code that would bar silk stockings, short skirts, bobbed hair, and sleeveless dresses, the flapper contingent defiantly broke into the meeting and chanted:

These young, self-styled flappers weren’t just trying to have fun; they were asserting their right to make personal