"Why Not Go the Limit?" (1908)

Smoking, women’s rights and a really great fake bar.

Sep 01, 2022

This cartoon by illustrator Harry Grant Dart appeared in the centerfold of a 1908 issue of the political satire magazine Puck. It suggests that there is a fine line between women smoking cigarettes in public, and the panoply of delights in a man's saloon -- heavy drinking, gambling, and ignoring the pleas of children to return home.

Caption: "For the benefit of those ladies who ask the right to smoke in public."
One of the signs on the wall beside the bar reads: "Women sometimes: Ladies never spit on the floor./ Ladies will please refrain from throwing cigar butts in the free lunch./ No scrapping allowed on the premises."

Women (or "ladies," as per the caption) were asserting their rights at the time, and smoking was indeed one of the symbols of acceptance or equality. President Roosevelt's own daughter, "Princess" Alice, occasionally smoked in public and was therefore a caution to proponents and opponents. Famously, her father forbade Alice to smoke "while she was under his roof," so she lit up her next cigarette while sitting on the White House roof. ~ Teddy Roosevelt Center

It’s a scene set in a fictional New York bar called Cleopatra’s Cafe, Mrs. P.J. Gilligan proprietrix, which is populated entirely by women. Captioned “Why Not Go the Limit?,” it’s meant to be a gasp-worthy image of a hellish future in which widows play cards over the police blotter, mothers neglect their children and women assiduously follow news transmitted over a ticker that is not a stock ticker, by the way, but a sporting ticker reporting the results of horse races and boxing matches on which these degenerates have doubtless placed bets. It strikes a different note to many a modern viewer, however. Its charming cocktails (I’ll have a Hot Maud and Eliza, thank you), fashionably dressed, liberated Edwardian ladies and its free lunch banquet of almonds and fudge make it look like a pretty great place to hang out.

From today’s perspective it’s easy to see this as an anti-suffrage piece, a vision of what could happen should the movement advocating for votes for women succeed. An imagined a world where women could vote and, consequently, had taken the traditional place of men as drinking, smoking, gambling barflies.

That’s actually the reverse of what is really going on at Cleopatra’s Cafe. The bar’s entire raison d’etre is the smoking. It has nothing to do with suffrage. The subheading under the caption is “For the benefit of those ladies who ask the right to smoke in public.” That isn’t code for a wider campaign of women’s rights, like women demanding the right to smoke in public along with the right to vote. The suffrage movement had no interest in addressing the question of women smoking because it wasn’t a political issue but rather a debate over social mores and bore no relevance to the struggle for voting rights. For more on suffragettes and smoking see: “Smoking, Women’s Rights and a Really Great Fake Bar.”

With this piece, cartoonist Harry Grant Dart made a rare appearance in Puck's pages. Such busy and complicated drawings were typical of him, but he drew magazine cartoons almost exclusively for Life, into the 1920s. He was prolific in the pioneer color comic sections of New York newspapers, too, as editor and cartoonist. His specialty today is called "steampunk" -- throwback contraptions that manage to fly, sail, and speed as modern, or futuristic, conveyances.

For the "steampunk" Dart, see this Forgotten Files post: