The “women” in 21 are men in drag. Frat boys or something. My 2 cents’ worth.
So…is 16 a boy or a girl? It looks like a boy…wearing a pleated skirt.
I don’t know when it stopped, but it didn’t used to be unusual for young boys and girls to be dressed alike in skirts. 15 is in a skirt too and there’s no way that’s a girl. I hope.
I’m pretty sure the thing in 16 is a balloon. A very wrongly shaped balloon.
I think that she is a man. Look how mannish and tall s/he is.
Look at the legs on him or her. The right leg looks kinda like a storks leg- like the knee bends backward instead of forward. Just looks very odd to me.
And a lot of stockings getting baggy at the knees in that pic.
15 is probably a boy, and they did put young boys in dresses/skirts, but only when they were wee little things like the child in 15. School-aged boys wouldn’t be in skirts or dresses as old as the kid in 16.
The only thing that looks boyish about the child in #16 is the haircut. The child’s face is still very androgynous, and the clothes are definitely a girl’s clothes - a boy of that age would be in short pants or something similar. My guess is that the child is a girl. Sometimes a child’s hair would be cut very short or even shaved off as part of treating an illness (it was thought to help reduce fever), so maybe she was very ill at some point and her hair just hasn’t grown any longer yet.
The child in #15 is very likely to be a boy, however. The idea that babies and toddlers must be dressed in gender-appropriate clothes is relatively new. Clothes were expensive, so it was better if all the children in a family could use the same baby and toddler clothes; skirts were easier as long as there were diapers, potty training, and short bladder warning fuses to deal with.
I’ve seen #3 before and it still makes me smile. That line-up-by-size pose is probably as old as photography itself, and this family managed it better than most.
Only for very young boys. When they were old enough to go outside on their own (in those far off days long before helicopter parenting), they’d start wearing knickers, or maybe shorts at first. I’m not sure when it stopped, but it was sometime early in the 20th century.
Is the creature in #9 a dog, or a monkey, or a dog-monkey hybrid? The face is *tres *weird.
#6 is a recreation of a famous guardian angel painting. Not a very good rendition of a not very good painting, but that’s where the weird idea came from.
The photographers great granddaughter is now a mom with a camera taking pictures of babies in over sized baskets with giant flowers on their heads, I just know it.