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Behind the sidewalk confrontations and draconian authorized rulings we will understand the anxieties of that publish-Victorian second: considerations about coarsening manners, about altering courtship rites, about the menace posed by modernity to the 19th-century supreme of "pure womanhood." Traditionalists’ fears had been heightened by the women’s suffrage movement, which held the promise of political enfranchisement and further freedoms, together with sexual ones. " lay mainly in that slangy endearment, "kid." Like another novel utilization of the interval, "baby," "kid" held a trace of pillow-speak intimacy-a frisson that was enhanced by the risk to "scold" the kid who fails to deliver a quick kiss. "Oh, You Kid!" was evidently a minor hit. Bassett was shot by George Lambert, a railway firm executive, after Bassett approached Lambert’s wife on the road crying, "Oh, you kid! You Kid!" But the unique had an extended cultural shelf life. Even comic songs had a pressure of moralism: In Armstrong & Clark’s "I Love My Wife; But, Oh, You Kid! Armstrong & Clark’s music had a plodding tune and an ungainly lyric; it didn’t catch on. |
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