Life, 1887-11-17 · page 12 of 16
Life — November 17, 1887 — page 12: what you’re looking at
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# Life Magazine Page 280: Social Satire This page contains two satirical pieces critiquing modern trends: **"On Ladies' Clubs"** mocks the proliferation of women's clubs in the 1890s. The *New Orleans Picayune* is quoted praising an "Early Rising Society" where young women pledge to wake at 6 a.m. and prepare breakfast. Life's editors sardonically respond that while literary clubs like "Browning clubs" are harmless, forcing daughters out of bed to cook threatens family health—describing their attempts as "dough bullets" and "gutta-percha omelets." The joke critiques both excessive club-joining and the pretense that domestic drudgery, repackaged as a club pledge, constitutes self-improvement. **The remaining cartoons** offer unrelated humor: a dyspeptic American tourist buying hot-water bottles for his queasy voyage home, and a "Love in the Tropics" sketch where a man interrupts a Zulu's romantic serenade to his beloved Rumeefum, sardonically suggesting she won't appear. The satire assumes readers will recognize the contemporary fad of women's organizations and poke fun at their earnestness.
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Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
280 ON LADIES' CLUBS. T looks very much as if the day would come,” says the New Orleans Picayune, “when all the doings of womankind, all their charities, works, studies, would be con- ducted in a club. Nowadays young ladies do not think they can read poetry, practise music, study art, visit the sick, give charity to the poor, except by organizing themselves into clubs. It can almost be said that lovely woman is a club, A lot of lazy young ladies in New Orleans have copied an English fashion, and have joined an Early Rising Society, pledging themselves to abst ing in bed later than six o'clock, and to perform certain commendable duties before breakfast. A society that will trundle a healthy young woman out of bed early in the morning, and have her to make up a pan of rolls of an omelet for the family breakfast table,” our contemporary add: worth twenty societies for the study of Browning, and should be encouraged heartily.” We regret that we cannot concur in the last assertion, Browning clubs are harmless, ‘The only risks in a Browning club are assumed by the individual members thereof. The perils of such an organization are not carried beyond the walls of its club-house and are simply innocuous in the family circle. But can this be said of the society which trundles the daughter of the household out of bed at six o'clock in the morning to conspire with flour and eggs against the health of her innocent brothers and sisters and the digestion of her parents? We think not; and we venture to add that when this Early Bird Club begins to exert its influence over the home of the editor of the Preayuse, he will be the first to complain of the heinousness of the offense of introducing dough bullets and gutta-percha omelets into the family circle. A system of this sort may do in despotic Russia, but in the “land of the free and the home of the brave” the line is drawn at celluloid doughnuts and canvas-back omelets, LIFE Dyspeptic American Tourist (about to return to his native land, enters shop in Liverpool): WHAT DO THOSE HOT-WATER BOTTLES cost? I'M SURE TO BE AWFULLY SICK AND I WANT SOMETHING THAT 1 CAN KEPP ON MY STOMACH DURING THE VOYAGE, LOVE IN THE TROPICS. Zulu (singing): OM, RUBY Lips I— RUMEEFUM, sweet RUMEEFUM, THY Unexpected Occupant : SAY, YOUNG MAN, | WOULDN'T WAIT FOR. RUMEEFUM IF 1 WERE YOU, I AM AFRAID SHE WoN'T APPEAR TO NIGHT. comicbooks.com