Studies in Expression: When Women Are Jurors

Charles Dana Gibson surveys an all-woman jury box with the cool sociological eye he trained on every stratum of American society. Two rows of women fill the composition: five seated in the foreground jury box—ranging from a severe older woman in black veil to a preening beauty in white feather boa—and seven more crowded into the gallery behind, each wearing the elaborate hat architecture of 1902 fashion. Gibson differentiates them sharply by age, class, and temperament: the pinched skeptic, the vain young belle, the stolid matron. The title's mock-scientific framing, Studies in Expression, smuggles in the era's anxious debate over women's suffrage and jury eligibility—implying that female jurors would be guided by vanity or sentiment rather than reason. The satire cuts both ways: Gibson's women are observant, varied, and unmistakably present.