What fascinates me about this and many of these 100-ish year old photos is the 'coarseness' of life. Look how rough and ill-fitting the clothes are. Look at the frayed, slept-on hair. The sad, baggy, wrinkled eyes. The forced attempt at a smile. Everything back then looked so... difficult. Like it was difficult to wake, to toil, to live. We with our tailored, micro-fiber accoutrements, our cell phones and our 300-horsepower cars have no idea what it was like to live rough, dirty, industrial lives. I'd give my left arm for a time machine, to go back and spend a week with this woman -- any of these people from the late 19th, early 20th century, for that matter. It reeks of romance on the surface, but the hard, callused underbelly of this life is often overlooked. It seems difficult to believe they could eek out any bit of happiness then. But they also didn't have the burden of computer-enhanced workloads, over-communication from the Internet and other trappings of the information age, fears of environmental collapse and overpopulation. I still believe we have a better life, but do we?

What do I know? I'm only 40 and don't know much about history. Fascinating, though. I love this site and lileks.com. Great stuff.

NerveBag

"Edgar G." is "J. Edgar", of course, my tongue slipped. But a quick search showed that I'm not the only one to make that mistake.
Ray B.

If she was definitely a Miss, there is little chance that she was whether Mrs; Leavitt and Herbert's sister, or, as i suggested, Edgar G.'s mom.

[Who is "Edgar G." - Dave]

Here is Mary B. Hoover, the same photo in fact, from the November 2, 1925, Washington Post.

[Oh my goodness. You are amazing, Pluckysparrow! - Dave]

In 1925, Mary Blanche Hoover Leavitt, the sister of the Secretary of Commerce (and future president) Herbert Hoover, would have been 48 or 49. The only newspaper photo I could find of her is a poor one (taken as she disembarked from a train for her brother's 1928 inauguration) which doesn't prove or disprove that it is her. She was married to Mr. Leavitt and probably living in California then, but it's still plausible that it's her.