Life, 1904-10-13 · page 9 of 22
Life — October 13, 1904 — page 9: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
**Top Illustration: "An Overworked Doctor"** Shows a male physician exhausted at his desk while a crowd of female patients waits outside his office. The accompanying text critiques marriages where husbands fail to provide emotional or moral support, leaving wives disappointed. The illustration suggests the doctor—likely a metaphor for husbands—is overwhelmed and neglectful. **Bottom Illustration: "Laugh, and the World Laughs with You"** Features five grotesque caricatured faces in profile, likely representing different female types or social stereotypes. The caption is a play on the common proverb about shared laughter. The page overall addresses marital disappointment and women's dissatisfaction in marriage, a recurring theme in Life's early satirical content about domestic life and gender relations.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
with the problem of earning a living for both of them, The woman who, while possessing abundant sentiment, still realizes that her husband has faults, and that these are counter- balanced by her own, will make out a very good trial balance. She will not be readily disappointed in marriage nor her husband. The failure of man to continue as lover after marriage is a source of disappointment to woman, The man, in assuming new re- sponsibilities and added worries, is crowding out old pleasures, thereby creating new con- ditions, It is these conditions, and not the man himself, which are the source of the woman's disappointment. AN OVERWORKED DOCTOR. There are, however, women who are genu- inely disappointed in their husbands. These are women who have failed to discover before marriage the man’s mental, moral or tempera- mental make-up. Their companionship before marriage was either a deception, or not suffi- ciently close for the woman to know he was unsuited to her. The woman who finds her husband lacking in the moral or physical courage she has ascribed to him, not possessing the mentality she thought was his, seeing absent any of the things which go to make up character, real- izes a true disappointment. The woman who feels desires and aspirations forming and ““LAUGH, AND THE WORLD LAUGHS WITH YOU.” 359 meeting with no response, who delights in music, poetry or art, who longs for close com- panionsbip, whose heart yearns for warmer, more highly strung affection, and who finds her soul starved because her husband can comprehend none of these, is truly disap- pointed in the man. He cannot give to her what he does not possess. Disappointment in marriage is not as hope- less as it sounds—conditions are subject to change—but a woman's disappointment in her busband—well, let the world hope that it does not occur in three out of five mare riages. Julia Vilette Finley, comicbooks.com