Dancing proved challenging in traditional women’s fashion, not only with long dresses but also with traditional corsets that tightly bound a woman’s midsection and accentuated her waist. Around 1923, French designer Coco Chanel introduced what became known as the “garçonne look,” featuring not just high hemlines but dropped or nonexistent waistlines and straight, sleeveless tops. With lighter and more flexible undergarments that created a straight, slim silhouette, this new design allowed women to dance freely.

It wasn’t just their fashion that made flappers; It was also their behavior and attitude. Flappers were young, fast-moving, fast-talking, reckless and unfazed by previous social conventions or taboos. They smoked cigarettes, drank alcohol, rode in and drove cars and kissed and “petted” with different men.

Women move to cities and into the workforce, but stayed in traditional ‘women’s roles.’

The flapper was born out of a growing landscape in America. By 1920, for the first time in the nation’s history, more Americans (51 percent) were living in cities rather than in rural areas. As part of the nation’s urbanization and economic growth, more and more women were entering the workforce. By 1929, more than a quarter of all women, and more than half of single women, were gainfully employed.

For the most part, however, the increase in working women didn’t represent a challenge to traditional gender roles. Nearly a third of working women in the 1920s were domestic servants, while the rest were clerical workers, factory workers, store clerks and other “feminized” professions. “Women are working, but they’re working in what are called ‘women’s jobs,’” says Lynn Dumenil, professor emerita of history at Occidental College and author of The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I.

Even women who blazed a trail in politics faced barriers due to their gender: Most female officeholders worked primarily on what were seen as “women’s issues,” preventing them from acquiring too much power within their political parties. It progressed though, with a handful of women would be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (none to the Senate), and many more served at the state and local levels.

Not only were women hitting a glass ceiling with job fields, but workplace discrimination and wage inequality also ran rampant throughout the ‘20s. As Gail Collins writes in her book America’s Women, the average weekly wage for men in 1927 was $29.35, compared to only $17.34 for women.

While their wages were not high, women joined the new mass consumer culture.

Their wages might not have matched that of their male counterparts, but working women used their purchasing power to join the nation’s new mass consumer culture. “The nature of domestic life changes for urban women, certainly, in the ’20s,” Dumenil says. By 1927, nearly two-thirds of American homes would have electricity, and new consumer goods like the washing machine, refrigerator and vacuum cleaner were revolutionizing housework and home life. Women were the major target audience for many of the new products, including household appliances, clothing and cosmetics.

The rise of the automobile contributed to the sense of freedom and possibility that suffused the Roaring Twenties. “The car is central to Americans’ lives in the 1920s, across the board,” Dumenil explains. “Not everyone can afford one, but consumer credit also expands in the ’20s,” leading to a new generation of American debtors. Meanwhile, the information revolution brought about by the emergence of the radio allowed a newly vibrant, youth-centered, urban culture to spread across the United States.

The flapper lifestyle also affected marriages and sexuality.

Housework wasn’t the only factor changing for women on the home front. “The nature of marriage starts to change,” Dumenil explains. “There’s more of a sense, not of equality, but more of companionship between men and women in marriage. The assumption about women’s sexuality changes.” Birth control was becoming more widely available, at least for more privileged women, which helped limit family size and allowed women the freedom to explore their sexuality without facing the consequences of unwanted pregnancies.

“At least for some women, there’s more freedom in their personal lives [in the 1920s],” Dumenil says. “A little less restriction. And it’s not just about sex, although that’s part of it, but clothing, dancing, the social world and the like.”

This freedom had limits, however, and marriage always remained the ultimate goal. As Collins writes, only about 10 percent of women in the 1920s kept their jobs after marriage, most of them working-class women whose family needed their paycheck.

“Women’s genitals are so sacred or so taboo that we can’t even talk about them at all, or if we do talk about them, they’re a dirty joke,” says Christine Labuski, a former gynecology nurse practitioner and now a cultural anthropologist at Virginia Tech and author of “ It Hurts Down There ,” a book about vulvar pain .

After all, how do you care for the health of something you can barely even mention?

And so it has gone for the vagina — its history is rife with myth, misunderstanding, and mistreatment.

The ancient Greek physician Aretaeus believed that the uterus wandered about the female body like an “animal within an animal,” causing illness as it banged into the spleen or liver. He also believed that it was drawn to fragrant smells, such that a physician could lure it back into place by presenting the vagina with pleasant scents.

In fact, there wasn’t even a medical term for the female sexual passage until around the 1680s. Before then, the Latin word “vagina” referred to a scabbard or sheath for a sword. So it shouldn’t be surprising that in the medical realm, the vagina and other female reproductive parts were long viewed as mysterious — and even treacherous — bits of anatomy.

For much of human history, the vagina has been to some extent a taboo subject — if not entirely unspeakable, then certainly not something to discuss openly.

From the cutesy “lady bits” to the friendly “vajayjay” to hoohas, lady business, and far too many insulting terms to name — the English language is a veritable smorgasbord of vagirific slang. We can be quite creative, apparently, when we don’t want to come out and say “vagina.”

We’ve always had vaginas, but it’s taken a long time to really get to know them — especially in medicine.

Before then, many drugs were never tested on women at all , on the assumption that they would work the same in both sexes. That assumption proved incorrect . From 1997 to 2001, 8 out of 10 prescriptions drugs that were pulled from the market posed greater risks for women , often because women metabolize them differently.

It wasn’t until 1994 that the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) mandated that most clinical trials include women (the last was first passed in 1993, but took effect after the NIH revised the guidelines ).

It might sound silly today, but the assumption of a male as the standard for the human body was persistent.

Why a scrotum can’t bear children — not to mention where exactly the clitoris fits into this scheme — wasn’t so clear, but Galen wasn’t concerned with those questions. He had a point to make: That a woman was merely an imperfect form of a man.

To be clear, this wasn’t just an analogy. As historian Thomas Laqueur has written, it was common belief at the time that men and women literally shared the same sexual organs .

So there you have it — Galen’s saying that if you imagine shoving all the man bits up into a man’s body, the scrotum would be the uterus, the penis would be the vagina, and the testicles would be the ovaries.

“Think first, please, of the man’s [genitals] turned in and extending inward between the rectum and the bladder. If this should happen, the scrotum would necessarily take the place of the uteri, with the testes lying outside, next to it on either side.”

Galen, who was considered the premiere medical researcher of the Roman Empire, rejected the wandering uterus but saw the vagina as literally an inside-out penis. In the second century A.D., he wrote this to help readers visualize:

And if modern-day women are often unclear about their own anatomy, you can imagine what ancient men made of it.

Often today, we just use the word vagina as a catch-all — maybe because if there’s a word we’re less comfortable saying than vagina, it’s vulva.

Oprah is widely credited with popularizing the “vajayjay,” but it’s not clear we’re all talking about the same body part. Is Oprah’s vajayjay her vagina — the channel from her cervix to the outside of her body — or is it her vulva, which includes all the external parts that I imagine when someone says “lady bits” — the labia, clitoris, and pubic mound?

Childbirth, which had been seen as a normal life event to be carried out at home, began to move into hospitals, says Sarah Rodriguez , PhD, a medical historian at Northwestern University.

What’s more, with the rise of modern medicine in the 1800s, far more people began to see doctors.

“Thanks to the new print culture,” writes Raymond Stephanson and Darren Wagner in an overview of the era , “sexual advice literature, midwifery manuals, popular sexologies, erotica… medical treatises in the vernacular, even the novel… became publicly available for an unprecedented number of readers.”

But during the Enlightenment period from 1685 to 1815, the sciences, including anatomy, flourished. And thanks to the printing press, more people started learning about sex and the female body.

Even Andreas Vesalius, a Flemish physician who was considered the father of anatomy, wasn’t always sure what he was looking at. He viewed the clitoris as an abnormal part that didn’t occur in healthy women, for instance, sticking instead to the view that the vagina was the female equivalent of the penis.

It wasn’t until the 1500s, during the Renaissance, that anatomists were able to peer inside the body and began to publish drawings of genitalia along with other organs. However, their images of the reproductive system were considered scandalous by the church, so many books of the time hid the genitals under flaps of paper or omitted them entirely.

Galen’s ideas about women rested on his shaky understanding of female anatomy, which was perhaps understandable since he hadn’t been allowed to dissect human corpses.

James Marion Sims was a young Alabama doctor in the 1840s when he took an interest in performing surgeries on women — then a fairly new undertaking. To do so, he basically invented the field of gynecology as we know it today.

First, he invented the vaginal speculum, which gynecologists still use to open and see inside the vagina, and then he pioneered the first surgery to repair vesicovaginal fistulas, a complication of childbirth in which a hole opens between the vagina and the bladder.

The surgery was a breakthrough, but the advance came at a great cost. Even at the time, Rodriguez says, Sims’ methods were seen as ethically questionable.

That’s because Sims developed the surgery by experimenting on enslaved African American women. In his own accounts, he discusses three women in particular, named Betsey, Anarcha, and Lucy. He performed 30 operations — all without anesthesia — on Anarcha alone, starting when she was 17 years old.

“I don’t think you should talk about his creation of these surgeries without mentioning those women,” Rodriguez says. “Fistula repair has benefited many women since then, but this came about with three women who couldn’t say no.”

In April of 2018, a statue of Sims in New York City’s Central Park was taken down, to be replaced by a plaque that will give the names of the three women who Sims experimented upon.

And while women today can find more information about their bodies than ever before, that also means they’re bombarded with more negative and inaccurate messages.

To many women, the statue’s removal was an important acknowledgement of the harm and neglect women suffered for years at the hands of the medical establishment. It really wasn’t until the 1970s, Rodriguez says, that women’s healthcare came into its own.

The book “Our Bodies, Ourselves“ was a major force in that change.

In 1970, Judy Norsigian and other women in the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective published the first edition of the book, which spoke directly and frankly to women about everything from anatomy to sexual health and menopause.

“That book was transformative,” Rodriguez says, “because it gave women knowledge about their bodies.”

And that knowledge empowered women to become their own health experts — the book has since sold more than four million copies, and women still tell stories of passing dog-eared copies around until they literally fell apart.

Clearly, there was a thirst for knowledge, Judy Norsigian says as she reflects back on that time. “Back in the late 60s and 70s we knew very little about our bodies, but we knew how little we knew,” she says today. “That’s what made women get together and do the research.”

Over the years, Norsigian says, the need for the book hasn’t disappeared, but it has transformed.

“There’s so much misinformation on the internet,” she says. She describes women approaching her at events and asking questions that show a lack of basic knowledge about the female body.

“They don’t understand about menstrual health and urinary tract infections,” she says, “or they don’t even know they have two different orifices!”

And while women today can find more information about their bodies than ever before, that also means they’re bombarded with more negative and inaccurate messages.

“Women today get the idea that you have to look like they do in porn, so they’re shaving and altering the vaginal area,” Norsigian says. “Vaginal rejuvenation is a hot surgery now.”

That’s why the last edition of the book — there’s no longer funding to keep updating it — has a section on how to find accurate information on the internet, and avoiding sales pitches disguised as education.