Life, 1913-01-09 · page 43 of 100
Life — January 9, 1913 — page 43: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
**The Cartoon:** "The Infant Samson" depicts a cherubic baby wielding a jawbone as a weapon while an adult woman (possibly representing "Woman" or modern womanhood) flies backward through the air, overwhelmed. The biblical reference to Samson suggests unexpected, destructive power emerging from an unlikely source. **The Article's Argument:** The text mocks women attending Kansas City courtrooms, claiming they approach legal terminology with superficial enthusiasm rather than genuine understanding. The author suggests intellectual women are easily distracted by novel concepts—whether "esoteric Buddhism" or legal jargon—treating them like toys, while remaining silent on subjects they actually understand (like motherhood). **The Satire:** This is anti-feminist commentary. The piece ridicules women's intellectual aspirations, implying they lack serious capacity for legal or philosophical engagement and are merely fashionable dilettantes. The final joke about suburban borrowing reinforces this condescension. **Historical Context:** This reflects early 20th-century backlash against women's expanding public participation and education, framing their intellectual pursuits as frivolous rather than legitimate.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
FROM LIFE'S COLLECTION OF OLD PRINTS}i THE INFANT SAMSON ‘Women and Terms HE Kansas City Times says that women in Kansas are now going to the court rooms to learn how the law is judicially administered, and that they are doing this in about the same way that they go to baseball games. “Replace ‘mutt’ and ‘slob’ and ‘onion’ with ‘incom- petent, irrelevant and immaterial,” says the Times, and you will get some notion of what the women are doing. So far as women and their activities are concerned, it is usually a matter of terms anyway. A new set of terms, properly applied to the consciousness of any American woman, will bring on a case of mild intellectual hysteria in a given time. Whether it is esoteric Buddhism, the transcendental dia- lectic, the football wedge, or the difference between a spon- dee and a dactyl, is of no consequence so far as any re- sults are concerned. Intellectual women in these days flit from one set of terms to another, as a bee goes from flower to flower, buzzing in between times with extraordi- nary energy. It is curious to note also that on those subjects which a woman really knows, she is usually silent. You never hear the mother of a baby giving lectures about it. A new set of terms fascinates the ordinary woman as a new toy does a child. “Q AY, ma, who said, ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be???” “Some person who'd never lived in the suburbs, Tommie.” comicbooks.com