Judge — June 27, 1903 — page 8: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This is a single-panel cartoon satirizing marital anxiety and women's fashion choices. Two fashionably dressed women converse about a man's marriages: his first wife wore revealing ("decollete") bathing suits that distressed him, so his second wife is deliberately thin and modest. The joke targets the absurdity of men's controlling behavior regarding women's clothing and appearance. It mocks the notion that a man would marry a woman specifically because she's thin enough to look less provocative in swimwear—suggesting his neurotic need to manage his wife's appearance and how others perceive her. The cartoon likely reflects early-20th-century anxieties about changing women's fashion (shorter, more revealing swimwear was becoming normalized) and satirizes restrictive masculine attitudes toward female autonomy and dress.