Smoking is dirty and bad for you, but other than that it's remarkable how indistinguishable these seem to me, given that the intent was obviously to offer a stark contrast.
Except 1600's woman has a footstool, and 1900's women doesn't, so that doesn't fit on it's own either.
The male dude who drew this apparently took issue with women's fashion magazines, probably for some sort of vanity-related reason, but that was a period where clothes got less complex and manufactured, so it's still ironic. That multilayered 1600's outfit is a great example. Maybe the footstool is to highlight the high heels, which might still have been in the period where it was a butch trend in imitation of cattlemen. The hair covering might also be significant.
The alcohol is pretty much the only other straightforward thing to interpret (although the glass might be a new style?), what with US and Canadian prohibition starting a few years later. Also, in my head cannon 1600's girl is reading from Song of Solomon.
A couple anthropologists have told me that this concept is as old as all recorded history: the youth used to respect their elders better, that people were kinder and more pious, that these are the last days.
Socrates bitches about kids these days quite a bit.
If you go to today's grumpy old people, and openly emulate something their parents would have done, it throws them right the fuck off, by the way. In my experience, they still think mom and dad were uncool, and implicitly think they're from the only generation that did anything right; the good-old-days stuff is just a facade.
