Life, 1923-11-29 · page 8 of 38
Life — November 29, 1923 — page 8: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains two pieces of social satire typical of early 20th-century Life magazine humor. **Top section ("My Husband Says"):** A humorous column where a wife describes her husband's enthusiastic endorsement of the Ladies' Tuesday Club. She notes he particularly admires the club president and mentions their dress-form lessons, referencing fashion designer Paul Poiret. The satire suggests husbands appreciated wives' clubs partly because they kept women occupied away from home for predictable periods. **Bottom cartoon ("A Case of Heredity"):** A gentleman caller compliments a young woman on being "a good risk," then impertinently asks about her father's cause of death. Her response—that she can't remember but it was "nothing serious"—creates the joke: her vague, dismissive answer about her father's death reveals either family dysfunction or the woman's shocking callousness, satirizing both courtship customs and social pretension.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
My Husband Says 'HAT the Ladies’ Tuesday Club is a wonderful institu- tion, for nearly one hundred men in our city almost know where their wives are for two whole afternoons every month. I think the club is awfully instructive, too. Our President looks stunning in the chair and everybody says she is a born leader. My husband says you would know that just to look at her husband. And we have three vice-presidents and a study class and lots of committees and chairmen and everything. Last week we had a lesson day on making dress forms. They are ever so simple. You just stuff a waist to make it look like your own form and varnish it to make it firm. The teacher said you can easily build your gowns on it My husband said he should think it would be discourag- ing, not to say terrifying, to most of the ladies to see a facsimile of their torsos standing in front of them, espe- cially if they were varnished. But the teacher said, “It now rests with you ladies to f astonish even Paul Poiret with the originality of your (a designs.” . TEM ENTTRE! KEENE VS Ai BEREEEE DITTEE My husband says that Paul Poiret was all through the I JUST WANT You To SEE our paNpy natn World War and nothing could astonish him BEFORE YOU Go—” L. Blanche Simpson. A CASE OF HEREDITY “YoU LOOK LIKE A GOOD RISK, MRS. MALONE, BUT WILL YOU KINDLY TELL ME WHAT YOUR FATHER DIED OF?” “OI CAN’T RIGHTLY REMIMBER AS TO THOT, SUR, BUT SURE IT WAS NOTHING SERIOUS.” comicbooks.com