72. Today in 1920s Turkey: 27 March 1924 (Calculating a Woman’s Age)

(Cartoon, Kelebek or “Butterfly,” 27 March 1924, no. 51, page 8.)

English
(Above)
During the Arithmetic Exam
(Below)
Teacher: A person who was born in 1884 is how old today?
Student: If it’s a man 40; if it’s a woman 25 or 26.

Türkçe
(Üstte)
Hesap İmtihanında
(Altta)
Muallim: 1300 tarihinde doğan bir insan bugün kaç yaşındadır?
Talebe: Erkek ise kırk, kadın ise yirmibeş, yirmialtı.

Comments:
This cartoon, consisting of a school boy standing before a demanding teacher, constitutes the visual background for the “joke” which unfolds in the text below. The title above it identifies the present scene as an “examination” for a math class. The teacher asks the boy a simple subtraction question to determine the age of a hypothetical person born in 1884. Defying basic principles of arithmetic, however, the student provides two different computations for an otherwise finite, definite calculation. The precocious young boy identifies an unexpected variable in the equation: the gender of the person. Accordingly, one can arrive at a man’s age by simple subtraction whereas a woman’s age requires additional manipulation and perhaps a degree of “interpretation” depending on where her age falls within a greater lifespan. The purpose of this exchange, of course, is to highlight and poke fun of women who lie about their age to seem more youthful. But are they really fooling anyone if even a child is able to notice their ruse?

Today we may commonly associate female “age gauging” with a more contemporary sensibility or obsession with youth. However, this preference for youthfulness or preserving a youthful age can be traced back almost a hundred years (and probably even earlier). This heightened awareness of age and aging is no doubt exacerbated by modern life, technology, and consumerism where “novelty” is the name of the game and acquiring the newest, latest products a way of life. Increasingly modernism has brought an depreciation of the old as obsolete (that is, unless antiquity is what is being “sold” as in tourism) and people, especially woman, tend to project these values unto themselves leading them to stretch the truth about their age.

This theme has reappeared in several other instances in previous posts. For instance in the most recent post (#71: Spring Flowers or Autumn Blossoms?) we see an older man attempting to “reframe” his age in order to appear more appealing to a much younger woman. And in post #53: Old Folks and Old Photos we witness an elderly woman trying to pass as a much younger woman by using an old photo of herself for an official ID card.

(Entire page, Kelebek or “Butterfly,” 27 March 1924, no. 51, page 8.)