Judge, 1919-08-30 · page 5 of 36
Judge — August 30, 1919 — page 5: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# "Ain't Angie Awful!" - Judge Magazine Satire This page satirizes Angela Bish through a serial fiction titled "Being the Love Affairs of Angela Bish," illustrated by Rea Irvin. The narrative mocks a woman characterized as perpetually unlucky in romance and marriage—repeatedly "thrown down by men" despite being "fair" and possessing useful domestic skills like gum-chewing. The embedded cartoon depicts a fireman at a furnace, captioned "Like a Fireman Feeding a Furnace, His Knife Went Up and Down." This appears to illustrate Angela's misadventures with yet another male figure. The satire targets prevailing gender stereotypes: women's limited value beyond matrimony, their supposed emotional volatility, and the era's cynical view of women's romantic prospects. The humor relies on schadenfreude—finding entertainment in a woman's romantic failures.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Tr Was Lucky For Her Tuat-Sue Was Usep to Beinc A WaALLFLOWER Ain’t Angie Awful! Being the Love Affairs of Angela Bish A Serial in Six Chapters Satirizing the Prevailittg Sex Stories By Gevetr Burcess Illustrated by Rea Irvin 1V—Tue Apventure or Tur Grarotion Company OR a young girl, life in New York is hard; so hard as to be practically indigestible. There were times when Angela Bish didn’t know where her next kiss would come from. Other girls fell in love, married, were beaten and divorced. But none of these blessings were vouchsafed Angela. Indeed, she had so often been thrown down by men that, at the Almost-Fur factory, where she glued whiskers onto blotting paper, to make sealskin coats, they called her Angie the Unbreakable. Disap- pointed hopes had turned her hair prematurely yellow. Ill as she could afford the luxury she would have given eight dollars any day for a husband, dead or alive. If wealthy, she would have preferred him dead. But all the matrimonial agen had given her up as too wonderfully willing. Men, they said, kindly, liked to pursue an elusive woman, like a cake of soap in a wet bath tub—even men who hated baths. But poor Angie began’ Like a Fireman Feepinc a Furnace, Hts Up ann Down to smile when a man was blocks away, and kept it up till the cops asked her if she were looking for the Home for the Feeble Minded. Yet she was fair—at least, fairly fair. She would have made a good wife for any dead husband. Besides her talent for gum-chewing, for which she had received a gold medal at the Refuse Collect- ors’ Annual Ball, she had incipient hydrophobia and many other ac- complishments. But they accom- plished little in the way of a hus- and. The fact was, Angie was usually sound asleep in and around the region between the ears, and she woke up only when marriage was proposed, usually by herself. Brains she had nix. The only answer she knew was “Yes”; and that didn’t get her very far with the tightwads she knew, unless they happened to ask her did she want a trolley ride. Yet it is always darkest just before Christmas. Even as she pored over the first lesson in the Correspondence School of Suicide, and had about decided to specialize in Rough on Rats, Romance was already sneaking into her hall bed- Knire Went