Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby: Marital incarceration
I was just browsing through some Wikipedia information about the flappers of the 1920's and I came across this little spark:
Flappers had their own slang ... a "Handcuff" or "Manacle" was an engagement or wedding ring.
Now that I think about it, Fitzgerald generally portrayed marriage as a restrictive thing in his book. Consider Myrtle's marriage to George, or Daisy's marriage to Tom; both are examples of marriages that seemed to impede the women involved and stopped them from doing what they wanted to do (run off with some other man).
Actually, this also reminds me of a hilarious episode of Everybody Loves Raymond in which Ray describes marriage like a hostage situation and imprisonment.
Usually, I thought this sentiment was more of a masculine one, but I guess (as Fitzgerald seemed to suggest) that women, too, can likewise feel trapped in marriage.
One more thing to note: Jordan Baker, the only unmarried female in the story, seems to exhibit the flappers' social attitude (though she didn't really dress much like them, to my knowledge). But at the end of the story, she mentions to Nick that she's engaged, which could probably allude to the return to family values and more conservative roles for women in society that was soon ushered in, culminating in the 1950's.