ZELIENOPLE - Ladies, if your great-grandma rouged her knees and rolled her stockings down, consider her your hero.

Flappers, women of the 1920s who dared to bob their hair and daub on makeup, "had an impact on the culture of today" that allows us to think and do as we choose, said Dacia Charlesworth, Ph.D., Thursday during a talk at the Passavant Retirement Center.

Charlesworth, coordinator of the Office of Honors Programs at Robert Morris University, presented the talk on changing fashions and societal norms of women in the Roaring Twenties as part of Passavant's 100th anniversary celebrations.

Open to the public, the presentation drew women whose mothers bound their breasts to flatten them and slung belts around their hips to draw attention away from their waists.

The women in the audience shared family stories of the uproar caused when years-long tresses met with scissors and young women picked bloodroot in the woods to redden their cheeks as only a harlot would.

By hiking their hemline, showing some skin, straightening out their curves and enhancing their faces with cosmetics, women of the 1920s "traded in their identity kits" and challenged the "cult of true womanhood" that had prevailed throughout the 19th century, said Charlesworth.

"The cult of true womanhood held that women should be pure, pious, submissive and domestic."

While these attributes applied to women before and during World War I, they are not associated with women whose hemlines rose from ankles to knees in a two-year span after it was over "over there."

The boyish figure of the flapper style had much to do with equality between the sexes. World War I and its drawing of men to the front lines brought women out of their strictly domestic roles. Women served in the theaters of war and they thought for themselves in ways they never had before.

"Most women of the time took on some component of the flapper," said Charlesworth, even if it was only the "anguished act of rebellion" as locks fell on the beauty shop floor.

When silent-film actress Mary Pickford bobbed her hair, the press called it "the end of innocence," said Charlesworth. Pickford's Samson-like haircut greatly diminished her power at the box office and was the beginning of the end of her career.

And while flappers are trivialized today as party girls, it was a courageous choice to eschew the corset and confines of expected behavior, Charlesworth said.

"Women didn't want a feminine figure or to be seen as a woman," said Charlesworth. The boyish figure and short hair was intended to put them on a more equal footing with men.

Nevertheless, they still wanted to be women, and the use of cosmetics normally associated with ladies of the evening gave flappers a sexual identity that had nothing to do with appearing pure, pious, submissive or like their mothers.

"My mother was proud of never wearing makeup," said one of the women in the audience. "My mother didn't like to see legs," said Helen Dewald of Cranberry Township. Yet, as a child her mom had been a tomboy and worked in the fields with her father - "just always in a skirt" she added.

Dewald came to the presentation because of her interest in Cranberry Township history.

Going from long hair and long skirts, from no makeup and little adornment to Thoroughly Modern Millie was a "significant shift," said Charlesworth. "Fashion is the best way to make permanent change."

The attire of a hippie of the 1960s can be compared to the flapper costume, and the ideas behind the two are similar, she added.

The legacy of the flapper is "social freedom" for women, said Charlesworth. But everything has its downside, as well. "Beauty became a full-time job. It became women's first obligation."

By the 1920s, Vogue magazine published a monthly column "On Her Dressing Table." One column began with the words: "To say that it is every woman's duty to look her best is trite, indeed, but it loses no truth through constant repetition. It is not enough that one's clothes are in the latest and most expensive style, although this may help; for the costume is only the setting for the face, which is, after all, the measure of beauty."