Life, 1925-10-08 · page 16 of 46
Life — October 8, 1925 — page 16: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This cartoon satirizes the fashion and social behavior of young women in the 1890s. The caption contrasts modern young women wearing "roller stockings and blatant knees" with their 1890s counterparts who wore long "rainy-daisy" skirts that concealed their legs. The joke targets contemporary (1920s) female fashion as more revealing and socially daring than previous generations. The illustration shows men and women interacting casually on a street, with women in modest floor-length skirts, implying that the 1890s represented stricter propriety. Below, "Mrs. Pop's Diary" begins a serialized column dated September 26th, discussing literature and charm. The satire critiques modern women's liberation through fashion as a departure from Victorian-era modesty standards.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
‘THE GAY NINETIES OUR MODERN YOUNG MISS WITH THE ROLLED STOCKINGS AND BLATANT KNEES IS PROBABLY THE DAUGHTER OF THAT HUSSY OF THE NINETIES WHO WORE HER “RAINY-DAISY” SKIRT WHEN THERE WASN'T A CLOUD IN THE SKIPS. Awakened this morning to the news that our pedalled garbage pail had arrived from Bloom- ingdale’s and great was my delight, for it has been one of my ambitions to own one, but the shops have never had them in stock when I did go in their search. So up and out to the kitchen, and worked the lid up and down with my foot until Katie regarded me gravely, as though she feared for my sanity. I did squeeze an orange, too, on our patent fruit-juice device, and cut off a large piece of citron to eat, and poked about in this and that until I was enjoying myself almost as much as when I was ten years old and our Lottie made me figurines out of pie dough. Then to my chaise-longue, where I fell a-reading of an article on charm, but the anonymous writer of it did fall far short of its accurate definition, to my notion. I September 26th do not quite know how to set it down, but I have unfail- ingly noticed that those rare persons of real charm do not own axes, and in the unconscious lack of them, I do think, lies the secret of their appeal. How difficult it is, too, for a novelist to make his heroine live up in dialogue and action to his description of her! Meredith does it well enough, and Henry James did make his Isabelle Archer indeed a lovely lady, but the woman of the most pervasive charm that ever I read about in my life is John Galsworthy’s Irene Forsyte. Lord! what a book “The Forsyte Saga” is! Had I aught to do with making the nation’s laws in Wash- ington, I should see a statute through requiring every citi- zen to read it, such matters being more important, methinks, than doing mysterious things to the tariff. (Continued on page 32) comicbooks.com