Thursday, October 17, 2019

Prohibition

Cartoons Magazine, 1921, from  Yesterday's Print.

4 comments:

G. Verloren said...

I'm not entirely sure what this comic strip is trying to say.

Obviously it is comparing the cost of dresses to the money saved by not buying drinks, but it is arguing in favor of that comparison, or against it?

Is the comic suggesting that old styles of dress were desireable and should be brought back, and if only families weren't wasting so much money on alcohol they could actually afford to "dress well" and recapture the lost majesty of the past?

Or is it mocking the old styles of dress as impractical extravagance, and trying to undermine Prohibition arguments about saving money by suggesting people would just waste it elsewhere? (And perhaps also employing a bit of anti-Prohibition sexism, depicting shrewish wives badgering their husbands to drink less on the argument that it costs too much, then turning around and spending the money on their own 'vices' instead?)

I somewhat suspect the latter - perhaps mostly because my sense of the 1920s is that the past was then viewed very unfavorably and people wanted to think of themselves as being "modern", and thus rejected things like old styles of dress.

pootrsox said...

No to all of the above.

It's pointing out how these old-fashioned women's fashions are ideal for smuggling booze into places during Prohibition.

G. Verloren said...

@pootrsox

Huh.

I mean, yeah, now that you say that, I get it...

...I just never would have thought of that on my own, because that is such an impractical and absurd conception of how one might smuggle booze that it never would have suggested the idea of smuggling to my mind in the first place. The joke relies upon a basic premise that, as I seeit, it only barely hints at.

Shadow said...
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