Many people probable enjoy these images as "strangely funny" because of their content: basketball players in what would appear to be school uniforms. Imagine playing basketball in that!

It's interesting that an article on this site, of all places, would call the subjugation of women via dress-code awesome. Usually the articles on this site are anti-sexist ad-nauseum.

Well, I must admit that girls in baskets is worth at least a wee smile -- just seeing how much fun they had in these photographs gives one a good feeling -- but "strangely funny" does miss the mark a bit.

They are dressed exactly as they and others expected them to dress at the time. There is nothing intrinsically funny about it. Just people who forget that not all individuals at all times and in all places think and act like they do. I'll not live long enough to know, but I imagine that 100 years from now people will shake their heads--and perhaps laugh--at our appearance.

One thing that gets overlooked when people look at pictures like this is the full context. On the one hand are those who laugh because the clothes look silly for sports. On the other are those who might see subjugation, because the young women are having to wear such impractical outfits.

What needs to be understood is that a large reason why women in western society are not in impractical outfits today is because of those women. Much of the momentum behind dress reform was because it made it easier for women to partake in athletics. The clothing those young women would have been expected to wear just a few years earlier in order to meet the barest standards of decency in their society would have precluded free movement or deep breathing. It was by women pushing to wear less restrictive clothing while engaged in athletics that women wearing less restrictive clothing whenever they liked became socially acceptable.

The young women in those pictures are on a brave cusp. They deserve respect, admiration and gratitude.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fe/Bicycle_suit_punch_1895.jpg

Yeah, I'm a little baffled by why these are all "funny," unless it's simply, "Old fashioned clothes--haha!" I found the ones where they had the year in large numbers on their uniforms a bit odd looking, but it must have been something that was widely done at the time--I've seen it in photos of male teams, too. And some of the poses seem incongruous for athletes, like the ones where they're lying down with their chins on their hands, and (especially) the one at the buzz page where the players are holding out their white skirts and pointing their toes. But if you're at all familiar with photography from this era, you can see how in those photos, they are consciously performing femininity, something that female athletes still often do when they are photographed today (although the markers of femininity have changed). And the one with the players in the baskets is probably intentionally funny.

But otherwise--yeah, those were standard women's sports clothes for the day. Certainly not any funnier than say, photos of male basketball players from the 70's when they all wore short-shorts and long socks.

In my mother's house hangs one of these photos--a team photo of her mother's--my grandmother's--basketball team in the flapper knickers of the time. Do I smile when I see it? You betcha! I also swell with pride. The family story is that my grandmother and her teammates were wearing brand new uniforms and thought they were hot stuff because they wore their knickers just above the knee. My mother speaks with pride about how girls basketball in her time was just as big a deal, if not a bigger deal, as boys basketball. (Yes, she was captain of her team, too). When she first told these stories, my state did not have girls basketball. My eighty-something mother talks about how basketball taught her grace and gave her confidence and gave her status she did not otherwise have, coming from a poor family. I both laugh with and love and admire all the varied stories these old photos tell us.

Personally, I think they're HILARIOUS. The funny thing (at least for me, and probably the person who made the article, IDK about anyone else) is not 'oh, tee hee, women playing basketball, get back in the kitchen, you.' It's their dress. Nowadays, women's sports equipment is roughly the same as mens. In basketball, since that is what's being discussed, women and men both wear loose fitting nylon shorts that come roughly to the knee area, jerseys or t-shirts, and basketball shoes to play. Women's basketball uniforms are just as practical as men's uniforms. These women, however, are not wearing practical basketball uniforms; because of their time period, wearing shorts, or even pants at all, would have been scandalous, so they're wearing impractical floor sweeping skirts and thick sweaters with poofy sleeves. Aside from the women in the sailor suit uniforms, I'm really not sure how they even managed.

I think it's funny that people are labeling these clothes 'impractical'. They fit the body loosely, and even the skirted ones are above-ankle length (most of them are wearing loose bloomer-type pants). I've done very active things in longer skirts and more-restrictive clothing than this.

Ironically, the move to skimpy, tight-fitting sports uniforms had meant the effective exclusion of many, many girls and women from sports -- particularly those with religious or moral or medical or personal reasons for not exposing their bodies (many Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and Christians, among others), as well as women and girls who have bodies outside the narrow socially acceptable ideal (who may be harassed for wearing revealing clothing).

There are very few sports where there is a convincing argument to be made that short and tight clothing actually aids performance. What is does 'aid' is an increase in male fans (and, presumably, queer female fans) and more media attention (= more money).

These photos are lovely and interesting, but I also find them really funny - they made me laugh out loud (before looking at them closer and wondering about the different people portrayed and their lives). Frankly, I find old photos of young people inherently funny, because of the ways in which they juxtapose contrasting things, and mix familiar and unfamiliar things. They make me uncomfortable and intrigued, a sentiment that is (I think?) at the heart of humour.

In this case, for instance, the posing itself is familiar from contemporary sports team or class pictures, but the costumes and hairdos aren't. That contrast goes against my preconceived notions of Victorian and Edwardian life, my impression of how femininity was constructed at the time, etc. These are girls wearing clothes that I have usually seen depicted on immobile bodies, but who clearly moved and took pleasure in that movement, and in competition; the girls in these photos also often have funny expressions that suggest the complex emotional life involved in team sports. I can imagine them playing pranks on each other, talking about life, laughing, etc. They remind me of the kind of social lives that I had and saw around me as a teenager, the mix of silliness and passionate intensity that we had and that I had no good reason to assume hat Edwardian-era girls would not have had - in so doing, and they make me uncomfortable because they make my assumptions apparent.

It's also really discomfiting to see young people who have been dead for decades - I recognize expressions that I've seen so many times on photos of my own friends in high school, but I also know that they (or most of them) have gone on to be women, to live complex lives (probably many as activists who have contributed to the various feminist movements from which later generations have benefited!), and eventually to die. There is something hard to articulate about the sentiment of looking at someone who really existed, intensely, but doesn't exist any more. Again, I think that that reaction, that sense of discomfort and awe, are funny (in the way that huge life events that we can't grasp often are).

Basically by putting together things that one would not necessarily see together, these images make visible the oddness of those things/ideas, encouraging us to question our preconceived notions. Which is, in practice, funny. I don't think that the funniness that inflects a person's perception of the photos necessarily diminishes their ability to respect the people depicted.

Also (and this may be a testament to my puerile sense of humor): basket-ball players in baskets = laughter!

It does say "strangely funny", which implies they don't really know why the pictures are amusing, they just are. Like most of the commenters I would suggest it's just the fact that they're from another time (the uniforms) and the very serious looks on many of the women's faces.

A lot better than a lot of Buzzfeed posts that are tiresome in a more overt way.

I work as a historical interpreter at a living-history museum. My costume consists of 1905-era skirt, petticoat and blouse, and semi-high heels and stockings and updo and hat.

Sometimes in the summer we like to play historical soccer. The only part of the costume I don't wear when we play soccer is the hat. So it's definitely possibly to play in that kind of gear, although it's pretty exhausting and sweaty-making.

The most striking part of the experience for me, though, was the fact that I was allowed to run around outside without my hat and shout and move quickly and things for a brief time once in awhile. It was extremely freeing, even under the oppressiveness of the clothing. I like to think maybe that's how these ladies felt, at least a little bit.

I personally find the images wonderful. I love seeing pics of women engaged in athletic pursuits, or taking time for the photos to record them with teammates. One of my grandmothers played basketball circa 1915.

I may have a photo similar to one of these, somewhere. She lived to be 99. She was always "her own person". She was married for 65 years but while married to someone who had his own prominence, many knew her as her own person, and were surprised to find out she was married to "him". I think that's cool.

She was a huge role model for me. I hope everyone to whom these photos now belong cherishes them.

And, regarding the U.S. and the white secular West generally, it is so dismaying to see what some women are coerced into wearing for the sake of "selling" their sport to commercial television. Aside from figure skating, beach volleyball LEAPS to mind. As if we'll ever see men in skimpy-cut speedos and tight short tank tops playing beach volleyball. Grrrr. The issue is that many women in sport don't have the option to cover up, which effectively makes the sports off-limits for many religious women, and, um, women who just don't think their skin being shown ought to be a requirement to engage in the sport. Only arms and bits of calf show in men's basketball. And in football--well, you know who someone is based on the number on their back, as faces aren't even clearly visible much of the time. So when white Western secularists go all ballistic over the attire worn by Muslim and Hindu women, or orthodox Jewish or Christian women, or modest secular woman, I just want to ask why it is assumed that showing more flesh (with the attire generally designed by men for het men's sexual interest, not by and for women with practicality in the forefront) is better than covering up.

The secular need imposed by men on women to show off flesh, in film, in sport, in society generally, is a not just obnoxious, it's tyrannical and oppressive. As an intergender male who is not transitioning, I would never got topless at a beach. And most of the women I know who once protested for shirt-free rights gave it up realising that unless and until het men stopped making every social space a hostile living environment for girls and women, there was not going to be much-to-anything "liberatory" about taking off one's shirt in public places.

In the online news coverage of the last shirts-free women's march I saw anything about, the het males lined the streets to gawk and make comments. Didn't seem like much was going on there that was anti-patriarchal, which isn't to say that I fault any woman who went for it. More power to them. Lots more power. And let's make that power institutional and systemic, so women collectively have actual rights to their bodies and how those bodies are viewed, photographed, displayed, mass produced, and responded to in violating and degrading ways by het men who think women exist to please them, and who claim any and all images made by men as "men's free speech" and not something done to women to ensure women are never free from gross and blatant objectification, fetishisation, violation, and exploitation.

I'll consider it a pro-feminist success WOMEN and GIRLS can wear baggy, loose-fitting clothes on the basketball court and be considered an excellent athlete and sports hero by young and old alike.

I think the last two were the pics that inspired the "strangely funny" line. Holding women in baskets? And in the last pic, the woman looking at the camera does have a strangely funny look on her face. The whole post is odd.

I found these delightful. I love the sense of humor displayed in some of the photographs, whether the women thought up those poses themselves, or the photogrpher did. The clothing seems odd to me for the sport they are doing, but that's the way it was then. I don't know that I'd term them "funny", though.

I have pictures of my dad in his football uniform circa 1935; I think that photo is delightful as well. His clothing is also odd for his sport; leather helmet, minimal pads.

The fact they're all white kind of ruins it for me. I know that was normal for the time, yadda yadda yadda, but I still have no intention of looking back nostalgically on a past that doesn't include me.

So, not so awesome. I hope we are more advanced today, Lisa Wade, but really I don't think we are. Especially not if we continue to fetishize our racist past.