Life, 1915-11-11 · page 16 of 44
Life — November 11, 1915 — page 16: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
**"A Matter of Costume"** satirizes gender norms around 1910s-1920s femininity. The top cartoon depicts a hunter encountering an elephant and mouse, illustrating the essay's argument: women's fear of mice isn't innate but rather a product of wearing skirts. The piece argues that if women wore trousers (then considered scandalous), they'd lose this "feminine" terror. The satire targets arbitrary social conventions—the claim that costume determines courage—mocking the era's rigid ideas about what women should fear or do. **"Happy Medium"** is a brief joke: Payton has avoided surgery because doctors only operate on the very poor (for experimentation) or the wealthy (who can pay premium fees). As a middle-class person, he escapes their interest entirely—satirizing how medical practice was stratified by class. **"Russian Lad Studying"** appears to mock Russian pronunciation difficulty through a cartoon of someone struggling with transliteration of Russian place names.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
A Matter of Costume Girls have been taught for generations that it is feminine to shriek at a mouse! Instead of that it's the height of the ridiculous —Emily James Putnam, HY are elephants afraid of mice? Is it because their education has heen wrong? Not at all. It is because there is a tradition among elephants that a mouse is a nasty thing to have run up one’s trunk. Just so there is a tradition among women that it is a disaster to a person in skirts to have a mouse run up her leg. Women's fear of mice is a matter, not of education, but of costume. Put women in trousers and they won’t mind mice. Happy Medium PAYTON: How have you escaped being operated Well, the doctors haven't fancied me poor enough for experimentation or rich enough for a desirable subject. RUSSIAN LAD STUDYING PRONUNCIATION OF NATIVE STRONGHOLDS N. $e A Hughes comicbooks.com