Green’s Dictionary of Slang

the legs, esp. of an attractive woman; occas. sing.

1860		Hotten Dict. Modern Sl., Cant etc. (2nd edn).
1873		Sl. Dict.
1895		Crowe Aus. Sl. Dict. 81: Stems, the legs.
1908		T.A. Dorgan in Zwilling TAD Lex. (1993) 38: Take a gap at the stems.
1911		E. Dyson ‘On a Bender’ in Benno and Some of the Push 77: Benno [...] stood in the middle iv the bar, swayin’ on his stem.
1915		T.A. Dorgan Indoor Sports 13 Aug. [synd. cartoon] Get the stems on her, Mae. I shopuld say she was brought up on macaroni.
1927		W. Winchell Your Broadway & Mine 14 Jan. [synd. col.] Cute hose on shapely stems.
1944		C.S. Montanye ‘Death with Music’ in Thrilling Detective Feb. 🌐 Four babes with bare stems breezed out for a rhythm grind.
1956		‘Ed Lacy’ Men from the Boys (1967) 28: I [...] watched her legs under the desk, wondered why I was looking—Barbara had better stems.
1965		T. Wolfe Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1966) 19: Bony, atrophied leg stems sticking up into their hummocky hips.
1970		C. Major Dict. Afro-Amer. Sl. 109: Stems, the legs.
1995		A. Heckerling Clueless [film script] (Cher accidentally/on purpose drops her pen. Christian sees the cue and picks up her pen. He gets a great view of Cher’s legs!) christian Nice stems.
1998		C. Carr Angel of Darkness 21: She had a set of stems on her what started in a pair of slender ankles and didn’t seems to end till somewhere up around the ceiling — and the ceilings in that building were high, mind you.