Starting this week, Washington Past staff writer Henry Allen embarks on a sense-driven tour through the 20th century decade by decade. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. Virginia Woolf was a little crazy of course. On the other hand, look at the photographs.
Women look at it the way they'd look at an annoying policeman.
Sometimes, lost in a focusless world of love or sublimity, they seem not to see it at all. Sometimes, with their cocked straw hats and feet on the running board, they look a little weaselly, like salesmen who aren't ashamed of themselves anymore. Women ignore their mothers' lessons on how a lady appears in public. They slowly jettison corsets, shed chaperons and hike their hemlines over their ankles. They face the camera with an amused wise-guy wariness.