Life — February 20, 1913 — page 14: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This satirical comic strip depicts domestic marital conflicts through six panels, showing wives in various exasperating situations with their husbands. The humor relies on visual metaphors: each panel shows a woman wearing an increasingly large halo, suggesting she deserves sainthood for her patience. The scenarios include a husband dismissing his hat as "just worn-out" while the wife must endure it, invitations to boring club gatherings, a husband requesting a lengthy vacation while leaving the wife home, and a husband asking her to abandon a vacation to stay home instead. The final panels show wives tolerating their husbands' contradictory demands and poor judgment. The satire targets the era's domestic power imbalances, depicting wives as long-suffering and morally superior to their unreasonable husbands—a commentary on marital inequality of the period.