Life, 1910-09-29 · page 27 of 40
Life — September 29, 1910 — page 27: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is political satire targeting American society's hypocrisy regarding women's status, using Sultan Abdul Hamid II's recent deposition as a springboard. **The Setup:** Abdul Hamid (Ottoman Sultan, deposed 1909) maintained a massive harem of 700-800 women. The satirist uses this as a mirror to mock American men's treatment of wives and women. **The Joke:** By calling American wives "harems" and applying Hamid's management practices to American domestic life, the piece sarcastically exposes how American men treat women as possessions requiring "proper training" and "home training"—essentially no better than an Oriental despot's practices. **The Sting:** The satire suggests Americans smugly criticize foreign "barbarism" while maintaining equally problematic attitudes toward women domestically. References to "Fifth Avenue" anchor this critique in contemporary American wealth and respectability. **The Airplane Cartoon:** "The Outlaw Making for Thick Clouds" appears to be separate—likely satirizing early aviation or reckless behavior, though context is unclear from this page alone. The piece mocks masculine entitlement and the era's casual misogyny.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
THE OUTLAW MAKING FOR THE THICK CLOUDS. The Use and Abuse of Harems BDUL HAMID, our readers may remember, was deposed not long ago, and the official members of his harem were supposed to number between two and three hundred. ‘These ladies were naturally pensioned by the government and the whole affair missed. It now appears, however, that they were not all; scv- eral hundred more have turned up, the total number we believe being between seven and eight hundred, who were mem- bers of the royal harem. The government Sac vrovided for them also, and is now uneasily awaiting future developments. This incident is important; it carries a lesson with it; it shows that we cannot be too careful in the manner of dis posing of harems. And the whole matter ought to be sifted to the bottom and thoroughly systematized. The truth is that to-day the neglect of our harems—the lack of home training in them and the want of proper re- ligious instruction—are having their effect and are beginning 1c show in our national life; unless something is done about it we shalt not answer for the consequences. Every person who is the owner of a harem—and they are now a part of every American’s goods and chattels (that is, if he has any self-respect)—should be made to feel his responsi- bility. We cannot let a harem do as it wants to do. Any harem that starts out with the best intentions is bound to go wrong unless properly trained. We sce this every day as we look about us—say on Fifth Avenue or along the co; in summer, One of the great defects in our American harems is that they are scattered about too much—they are, so to speak, too diffuse; when you want to round them up and take a census of the inmates you never quite know where to find them. They ought to be concentrated. Abdul Hamid had the right idea. He kept them in one place. Like Barnum, he had his winter quarters for them, and it was only when he got old that they began to stray away from him. Now, a harem is a harem, no matter where you find it. It is just as much of a harem in New York as it is in Constanti- nople; of course, we don’t like to refer to it in that manner, but that is only because of our absurd sense of delicacy, And yet we may well ask ourselves, as American citizens in good standing, whether we should not face our plain duty; we owe it to our harems to recognize them and to acknowledge their services. You know how it is yourself; if you work along without a kind word, with no credit, you begin after a while to get discouraged, and your character suffers; that is what is the matter with our American harems; they haven't been given any show; they have been too much ignored publicly and it is telling on them, Every American citizen, therefore, who can afford it and who has a harem (and who of them has not) should get them together and give them the benefit of his influence and ex- ample, He should take them out for a daily constitutional, should see that they go to church and Sunday-school and should have the proper kind of home training. And if he docsn’t feel that he is capable of doing this grand work alone he should get his wife to help him. She would just love to do it.