A.D. 1915 — With Puck's Apologies to the "Coming Woman"

Frederick Opper's cover imagines a satirical future in which suffrage has inverted domestic order. A garishly overdressed woman—feathered hat, mismatched plaids, umbrella tucked like a weapon—confronts a timid, aproned husband clutching an infant at his front door. The caption dialogue identifies her as "Dusty Maude," demanding food and threatening to "clip yer whiskers." The husband reports that "the lady-folks" have all gone to a primary meeting. Even the dog retreats into its kennel. Maude is drawn with the exaggerated red-nosed, slack-jawed caricature Opper applied broadly to immigrant and working-class figures in this period. The cartoon's politics are straightforwardly anti-suffrage: votes for women, Puck argues, would masculinize wives and humiliate husbands, reducing home life to comic chaos.