Life, 1915-09-09 · page 30 of 44
Life — September 9, 1915 — page 30: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page satirizes former Connecticut Governor Thomas M. Waller's objection to one-piece bathing suits at New London's Ocean Beach. The article argues that Waller's prudishness reflects outdated Victorian morality—comparing his sensitivity to the absurd practice of putting "pantalettes on piano legs" to hide their shape during the Civil War era. The satire's point: Connecticut's strict "Blue Laws" represent an overly rigid historical sense of propriety that gradually evolves. One-piece suits, already accepted at European beaches like Ostend, will eventually become normal in Connecticut too. Waller's mortification reveals how relative and time-bound moral standards are. The two cartoons below—"When Good Fellows Get Together" (soldiers in a trench) and "How It Feels When a Big Car Goes By" (a small car dwarfed by a larger one)—appear to be unrelated humorous illustrations typical of Life's format, not directly connected to the bathing suit debate.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Bathing Suits in Connecticut ON. THOMAS M. WALLER, sometime Governor of Connecti- cut, deprecates the propensity of bath- ers at New London's Ocean Beach to one-piece bathing-suits. Both sexes do it, Mr. Waller says, and the pieces are so small that on several has felt compelled to walk away from the bathing beach to hide his — mortification. One-piece bathing-suits inst the regula- tions of the Beach, Mr. Waller says, and he thinks the authorities should enforce the law. He has a fatherly interest in the Beach, because he got New London to buy it, and he is sen- sitive about its propri But as for the one-piece bathing- suits, there are two ways of treating them. They can be made to meet the regulations, or the regulations may be permitted to meet them. Regulations wear occasions he “WHEN GOOD FELLOWS GET TOGETHER are merely the expression of a com- munity’s sense of propriety at the time they were made. The history of Con- necticut is a record of gradual and steady amelioration of an over-strict sense of propriety for two centuries and a half. The Blue Laws are evi- dence of Connecticut's early fidelity to the great principle of Verboten. Give the one-piece bathing-suits a fair show and a little time, and presently they may satisfy the local sense of propriety of the Connecticut beaches, just as they do at Ostend or Sche gen. Governor Waller's sense of pro- priety took shape in the Civil War period, a time when American society was just emerging from the practice of putting pantalettes on piano legs. We have come a good ways since then, but still lag a little in the matter of woman's bathing clothes. enin- HOW IT FEELS WHEN A BIG CAR GOES BY comicbooks.com