Charles Dana Gibson, "Studies in Expression: When Women Are Jurors" (1902)

Gibson arranges fourteen women in what reads as a jury box: a front row of five seated figures and a back gallery of nine observers, rendered in his signature precise pen-and-ink line. The central figure wears a mourning veil and clasps her hands—presumably the defendant or a witness commanding attention—while the jurors around her display a spectrum of reactions: skeptical sidelong glances, open-mouthed curiosity, prim disapproval, theatrical sympathy. One figure in the back row is rendered with the broad facial caricature Gibson's era routinely applied to working-class or immigrant women, a shorthand that reflected and reinforced class and ethnic hierarchies normalized in mainstream illustrated humor of the period. The plate's argument is gently satirical rather than hostile: Gibson does not oppose women in civic life so much as he audits female social performance, suggesting that a jury of women would be as consumed by interpersonal drama as by evidence—a knowing joke about a right American women would not win nationally until 1920.