Life — June 4, 1914 — page 19: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This page satirizes the emerging trend of women wearing **trousers** in early 20th-century society. The cartoons mock anxieties about female dress reform through exaggeration: 1. **Top right**: Women in business attire smoking cigarettes—suggesting trousers lead to "masculine" vices 2. **Top left**: A woman in a skirt wielding weapons, captioned that police-women refusing trousers must wear *shorter* skirts to chase criminals 3. **Bottom**: Fire-fighting women in abbreviated rubber skirts, supposedly for ladder-climbing The satire targets **multiple concerns simultaneously**: - Social hysteria over women abandoning traditional feminine dress - Questions about how women could function in new professional roles (police, firefighting) - The absurdity of compromising either modesty or practicality The joke is that reformers face impossible choices—wear trousers (scandalous) or wear impractically short skirts (also scandalous). The cartoons mock both the conservative resistance to change and the practical difficulties of integrating women into male-dominated professions.