Life, 1915-02-25 · page 18 of 44
Life — February 25, 1915 — page 18: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page addresses early 20th-century generational conflict. The editorial argues that rapid social change since the 1870s has made parents' traditional values obsolete—comparing modern transformation to the entire span from Henry Hudson to the Civil War. The central tension: young women (particularly daughters) now want employment outside the home, conflicting with traditional expectations that they prepare for family life. Parents struggle because the world they knew no longer applies, yet they cannot confidently guide children toward an uncertain future. The cartoons illustrate this friction. The top drawing shows a father threatening corporal punishment ("light a fire under you") to a child—depicting outdated parental authority. "The Bride" cartoon satirizes newlyweds so concerned with propriety they won't even react to violence, suggesting rigid social conventions persisting despite changing times. The satire targets conservative parents caught between old values and new realities, unable to help because they don't understand the emerging world themselves.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
“ERE * Tough Times for Parents HESE are very difficult times for parents of grown-up children. Just now the world has fallen in a fit, and we watch its convulsions in Europe and wonder how it is ever to come out of them. But for a whole generation it has been changing fast, and for at least half that time its changes have been precipitous. Life has changed more since the early sev- enties than it changed from the arrival of Henry Hudson to the Civil War. The trick with children seems to be to bring them up to meet the life that is to come. Mature parents have had to fight with the disposition to bring up their children to suit the life they knew themselves—a life that is not only past, but seems as dead as Rip Van Winkle. Every day they have to fight that instinctive disposition. All naturally conservative people have been dragged along so fast and so roughly for fifteen years that they only have dim notions now as to their own whereabouts. They think there will continue to be life if the girls can find time to raise some children, but what sort of a life it is going Regllset Papa: COME ALONG Now, BABY. IF YOU DON'T STOP THAT BALKING, PAPA'LL LIGHT A FIRE UNDER YOU to be is something that they see darkly. Just now all the likely girls seem to want outside employments, beginning about nine in the morning and lasting till five or six at night. How this aspiration is going to fit in with the femjnine obligation to raise a family, heaven knows. But evidently to put obstacles between the contemporary girl and her job is to obstruct her preparation for this new life that is just ahead of us, and that, of course, prudent parents do not wish to do. Really, these are pretty trying times for parents of grown-up children. They yearn, of course, to be useful, THE BRIDE but to themselves they often look merely obstructive. One “IP HE SAYS A WORD, LADY, I SHOOTS HIM IN DE sees their struggles and hears their sighs, but all they can sTOMACH |” de is to go with the current, navigating to the best of their “OH, PLEASE KEEP QUIET, HAROLD! IF HE SHOOTS ability, but mighty uncertain where it is taking them and HELL UTTERLY SPOIL OUR FIRST DINNER!” their precious charges,