Judge — October 26, 1929 — page 1: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# "She Gets the Brakes" — Judge Magazine, October 28, 1929 This cartoon references the **Lenz Bridge Contest**, a 1920s engineering competition. The title "She Gets the Brakes" is a pun: a woman stands triumphantly while two men (appear to be rival bridge designers or engineers) sit dejected below, their work literally "braked" or stopped. The cartoon satirizes the surprise or scandal of a woman winning a major engineering competition—suggesting that men expected to monopolize such prestigious technical achievements. The men's defeated postures and the woman's confident stance emphasize the upset. Published just days after the 1929 stock market crash, this appears unrelated to that crisis, focusing instead on gender competition in engineering during an era when such fields were almost exclusively male-dominated.