The Charleston is more than a dance; it’s your drug.

As silly as it may have looked – the toes-in, heels-out twisting steps, the wildly swinging arms – the 1920s dance craze the Charleston actually played a serious role in feminism. Finally gaining the right to vote in 1920, women were ready to liberate another important domain: their bodies. And what better place for this battle than the dancefloor? It was impossible to do the new, energetic Jazz Age dances in a constricting Victorian corset, so off it went, as the skirts rose higher and hair got cut into short bobs, worn as a badge of ‘flapperhood’. The extravagant, thrill-seeking Charleston was rooted in African tradition and cut across social barriers with its muse: African-American dancer and civil rights activist Josephine Baker. Blossoming in Harlem in the early 1920s, it quickly became a world-wide phenomenon, its typical ‘flapping’ arm movements even inspiring the term ‘Flapper’, according to some. Meanwhile, in the dark, throbbing Jazz clubs, fabulous Flappers danced on the tables in their fringed dresses and broke taboos by smoking cigarettes – something only men had done previously – and experimenting with casual sex, creating nothing less than the concept of dating. Not surprisingly, between 1914 and 1929, the divorce rate doubled in the US. Yes, it may have been ‘just’ a dance, but thanks to the Charleston, women got to put the ‘roar’ in the ‘Roaring Twenties’.