Friday 18 February 2011

Patsy's Reflections

Patsy's Reflections is a spiral bound paperback from the early 1950s, collecting together a series of strips that ran in the Daily Mirror newspaper. The strip's heroine is Patsy, a young housewife struggling to learn to cook and manage a house under wartime rationing conditions. Most of the strips focus on her culinary adventures ("Dad's GI friend told me about these Franconia Parsnips - sit you down dear, and watch!") but later in the series, Patsy becomes pregnant with her first child and the recipes make way for baby care advice.

Above, Patsy and her mother discuss the most economical way of clothing the new arrival - "don't buy too many things - why not make them? Nicer, and cheaper too!" Patsy and her mother didn't have a global sweatshop industry manufacturing clothes for them at very little cost.


Love the big knitting-related hug in the last panel. That baby is going to be very well clothed.

2 comments:

  1. How would baby clothes be different "now"? Is mother concerned baby will just not be fashion forward enough? Aren't most baby clothes kind of timeless?

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  2. Hmm... how would they be different... maybe if Patsy is in her 20s in the 1940s strip then she would have been a baby in the 1920s - maybe baby clothes in that period were more extravagant and not subject to war time rationing?

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