Judge — September 17, 1927 — page 14: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

LADIES’ HOME JOURNAL NUMBER OF (an Women Ever Understand Men Really P E men, who have built this great journal by telling you ladies where you get off, sometimes wonder whether you appreciate us, really. This is a frank confession. (Your grandmothers will remember, little girls, that the Ladies’ Home Journal invented and printed frank confessions years before Bernarr MacFadden and the Atlantic Monthly made them respectable.) Well, we confess that we don’t know quite where we stand with you. (That’s the man of it, you say; a man is forever wanting to know where he stands with a woman.) Don’t flatter yourselves, my dears; it’s not that we care so much; it’s just that our advertisers are always wanting to know. “As men talking to men,” these crass advertisers say, “we say to you that you are doing a noble service in trying to educate the ladies, God bless their pretty, empty heads. But do the ladies themselves quite grasp what you tell them? Are you sure they can understand your masculine wisdom, really?” And we are forced to reply, “To be candid, really, we aren’t sure enough to give you our word of honor, but we are sure enough to accept your order for twelve double-page spreads in colors at $35,000 per insertion.” * * * * OW consider the awkward position you put us in, inconstant readers. We know we are right. Our advertisers know we are right. But do YOU know we are right? Really, you have been getting out of hand. You used to be quite tractable. When we told you not to embroider pink roses on green plush and not to put the conch-shell beside the majolica vase on the what-not, you obeyed. When we con- demned the bustle, you made it over into a sofa- pillow. It was a poor sugar barrel indeed that you did not glorify into a parlor chair, at our behest. We decreed that you must not feed father pork pie and plum pudding at the same meal, and taught yea to satisfy him with a lettuce leaf and half a slice of pineapple. All your innocent little secrets about sex and budgets you poured into our attentive ears, and seldom did you sue us when we published them. That was a lovely relationship. On the strength of it we coined our unique slogan, “Not a maga- zine but an institution,” and gathered in as sub- scribers all the native-born, white, literate females in the country, except one in Arizona, who Happened to own complete files of Godey’s Lady’s Book. THEN something happened, as it so often does. Being chivalrous men, we shall not try to fis the blame on individuals.’ It may have been Lucy Stone, or Mrs. Bloomer, that altered you. We leap over to the horrid present-day in which, deeply as we regret it, we have to live, and con- trast the conditions we see all around us with the directions we have been giving you. You smoke. Now don’t deny it, you know you do. Nasty. You no longer sweetly tell your children the Facts of Life. Indeed, you suspect that you let them tell you, and roughly too. You do not compel your children to obey, al- though we frame the precepts for you; thus you are encouraging in them habits of independent thinking which is going to make it very hard for us editors when they grow up. You expose your knees in public places, thereby embarrassing us, not because we have to look at them, but because we feel responsible for them. By your lavish use of cosmetics, making your- selves more beautiful than Nature or we intended you to be, you especially annoy us, because you let yourselves be influenced thereto by the very advertising in our magazine. considerate of you. You marry men of your own choice and divorce them of your own will; you tend toward a pro- gressive polyandry. * * * * you seek to obtain knowledge slyly and illicitly from outlines of history, philosophy, literature and religion, you undertake question games and cross-word puzzles, altogether failing to realize that if you did not go to college it is not fair to try to get culture by shortcuts, except through our own columns. You read the novels of Sinclair Lewis, and haven’t we been telling you he is a flop, an up- start, a false prophet who will never be able to convince anyone but you and a few million others that realism has supplanted romance? You believe H. L. Mencken when he says that there are boobs and yokels in this glorious land. And his circulation not a fraction of our own! Going to work, you take jobs that men ought to have, and do them better, shame on you. You get into politics and get onto the bunk. You engage earnestly in idealism and reforms, with- out taking our word for it that things are quite all right as they are, really. This is most in- comicbooks.com