Josephine Baker and the wild women of 1920s dance – in pictures

Banned for indecency … the Canadian Maud Allan in her Salomé costume in 1906. When she brought her dance, The Vision of Salomé, to Britain in 1908, one rightwing commentator accused her of inciting depravity, particularly lesbianism Photograph: Alamy

I will kiss thy mouth … Maud Allan in The Vision of Salomé, the work that led to her being accused of spreading 'the cult of the clitoris'. Margot Asquith, wife of the British prime minister, was a fan of the piece, however, seeing in it promises of new freedoms for women Photograph: Alamy

'The Nefertiti of now' … the American singer and exotic dancer Josephine Baker who, having endured racial abuse growing up in St Louis, found herself feted in Paris Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Gaga who? … Josephine Baker in a typically extravagant costume. Another outfit featured a skirt made out of jewel-encrusted bananas. The beauty industry used the erotic dancer in its adverts, highlighting the fact that jazz age symbols and figures had the power to cut across social barriers Photograph: Alamy

As easy as 1-2-3 … a step by step guide to dancing the Charleston. As the dances got wilder, so did young people's morals – between 1914 and 1929, the divorce rate doubled in America, and pre-marital sex was rising too Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Invasion of the flappers … women kicking and dancing amid roving musicians during a Charleston dance contest at the Parody Club in New York in 1926. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The great Zelda … F Scott Fitzgerald's wife, whose dancing inspired his fictional flapper heroines. Zelda liked to lift her skirts high above her waist to emphasise the swaying of her hips Photograph: Alamy

The husky-voiced fizzer … Tallulah Bankhead, seen here in a scene from Let Us Be Gay at the Lyric in London. The actor and dancer from Alabama made her London debut in The Dancers, a story of two very different dance-mad women, one of whom succumbs to a netherworld of nightclubs, cocktails and sex Photograph: Sasha/Getty Images

First on the floor … Diana Manners, the British aristocrat who hit nightclubs whenever she could give her chaperones the slip. Having trained in ballet and Russian folk dance, she revelled in this fledgling world of cigarettes, lipstick, Pink Ladies – and dance Photograph: Alamy