They drive me to drink...

"Cherry Mismas, hic!"

rmrdaddy said:

I'll take a triple with Geesie!

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lol lol lol lol lol lol ~~~~~~~~~~>>>>> BUAHAHAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!

dhermann1 said:

Nah. It's 1970's or later.

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Some poking around hasn't revealed anything definitive.
The National Park Service has it in their Edison collection, claiming that it's from an Edison film however others think that it's far too high quality for that and that it's from a 1930s comedy film.

I think it's a still from an early Three Stooges short from 1935, "HORSES' COLLARS". [huh]

dhermann1 said:

Nah. It's 1970's or later.

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The quality of the costuming is SUPERB if the whole thing is faked - so very good on so many levels that I still can't believe it's faked. The more I look at it, the more authentic detail and variety I see. That is an original photograph, from the later decades of the 19th century. The picture as a whole, however (with the sign), could have originated from the 70s for all I know.

Mojito said:

Yes, certainly the lampooning of a popular Temperance movement slogan - I'd love to know whether it was early or more recent, though!

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Closest I can get to authenticating the image is that it is an early movie still from Thomas Edison's lab that was dubbed "Black Maria". Wikipedia states that
(Emphasis mine)

The first films shot at the Black Maria, a tar-paper-covered, dark studio room with a retractable roof, included segments of magic shows, plays, vaudeville performances (with dancers and strongmen), acts from Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, various boxing matches and cockfights, and scantily-clad women. Many of the early Edison moving images released after 1895, however, were non-fictional "actualities" filmed on location: views of ordinary slices of life — street scenes, the activities of police or firemen, or shots of a passing train.

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This is confirmed from the same shot listed in the National Park Service website.

However, a comment in a blog claims that the lady in the middle directly below the sign is British actress Sue Johnston. Although the resemblance is similar, I'm inclined to think not. Judge for yourself:

My main reason for thinking as I do is the obvious posed expressions. They're trying to look as haggy as they can. They're wearing scowls like Margaret Hamilton in Wizard of Oz.

The problem with the Black Maria theory comes when you look at actual confirmed Black Maria stills - the quality of the authentic ones is really, really low.

dhermann1 said:

My main reason for thinking as I do is the obvious posed expressions. They're trying to look as haggy as they can. They're wearing scowls like Margaret Hamilton in Wizard of Oz.

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Something I've noticed of pictures of that era and even later, people most always looked serious and didn't smile much when posing for pictures.

In either event, if I had to pick one of them, it would be the young brunette sitting on the left with her left elbow propped up. I'll bet she's really pretty if you could just get her to laugh and smile and forget all that temperance nonsense.

It would not be unusual for a movie of that time period to recreate for comic or documentary effect a period of the late 1800s.

The characteristics we see in the figures depicted - the sour-faced women in dress that, while it had been worn within distant living memory for those living in the 50s and even beyond, was considered very old-fashioned - form a recognisable stereotype that was already popular in caricatures that depicted older spinsters, temperance movement women, and even suffragettes from the Victorian period and beyond. The caricature persisted - I have beachside humour cards dating to the 1920s that depict the same recognisable "type", even though their costume elements date to the turn of the century and before. There are echoes of it even in the "Miss Grundy" of Riverdale High.

The "Mrs Grundy" archetype is the disapproving character personified by an unfashionable, dour woman we see in these images, and originates in the 1798 play "Speed the Plough" by Thomas Morton. She personifies tyrannical social censorship.

Here she is in an 1990 edition of Punch, confronted by a copy of Dorian Gray:



In 1886:



This is the sort of thing:



The conventionally unnattractive women, often with upswept hair and hat perched atop it, dark clothes, high collar, pursed lips, and vaguely late Victorian/Edwardian attire permeated other comic forms than political satire.
I'll see if I can scan some of the images I have - they "type" is usually either seen as man-hating (sometimes via implied sour-grapes), or man-chasing, frustrated spinsters.

I have no doubt that the humour in the image above is absolutely deliberate - the anti-temperance movement was consistently caricatured in this way, as a bunch of po-faced kill-joys. "A pack of wowsers" is how they would have been referred to in Australia.

Mrs Pankhurst and sister suffragettes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L13b0t9aARY

I think the temperance movement and the suffrage movement, while they may have had considerable overlap, should not be confused.
Anyway, all that notwithstanding, your clip shows two of the most adorable women who ever lived, Glynis Johns and Elsa Lanchester. They're both candidates for favorite vintage girl in my book.

I agree, dhermann1 - while there were women who were active in both movements and some overlap, they are not synonymous. My point was about the "Mrs Grundy" stereotype common to those deriding women active in these movements - it could be applied to others in which women were activists, such as the anti-vivisection movement.

A couple of Grundy-types are recognisable in this cartoon:





And a particularly nasty one about the force-feeding of suffragettes in prison:



Pro-suffragette, Temperance etc material depicted the women involved in a very different manner:



Photos of the women involved in these movements show a cross section of ages and physical types - although the demographic breakdown might favour particular groups...(single older women might have had more time to devote to social causes, but I don't know if that's the case).

Here's a group of African-American Christian Temperance women of the 1890s:



Pro-Temperance propaganda:

A lot of those women at that time tried to look as plain and unattractive as possible. The victorians were extraordinarily prudish. It wasn't just alcohol either, it was also tobacco. Queen Victoria herself hated cigars in particular and refused to allow her family to smoke in her house

At Victoria's death the soon to be King, Edward, offered his brothers and friends those wonderful words, "Gentlemen, you may smoke"

Reminds me of Refer Madness.

ROFLMAO!