Life, 1913-03-13 · page 25 of 44
Life — March 13, 1913 — page 25: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This satirical illustration critiques marital economic inequality and gender dynamics. A woman proudly displays her expensive new white fox coat (costing $1,200 at Skinner's department store) to another woman. Behind them stands her husband, who cannot afford a new suit and must wear his old outfit, which he apparently despises. The joke targets the absurdity of wives' luxury spending while husbands lack basic necessities. It satirizes either the husband's financial irresponsibility in allowing such extravagance, or—more likely—critiques the social expectation that wives control household spending on frivolous fashions while men's needs go unmet. The accompanying article discusses aesthetic judgment and social conformity, suggesting the broader satire concerns how people prioritize superficial status symbols over practical family welfare.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
First Female: My NEW WHITE FOX COAT—WHAT DO YOU THINK OF IT? SO SORRY HE CAN’T AFFORD A NEW SUIT. HERE'S HUBBY Now, are every whit as idiosyncratic, yet quite as broadly typi- cal of normality, as the vagaries of our respective psy- chologics. Moreover we are, at first, quite as doubtful of the validity of these zxsthetic promptings, and even more frequently frightened into smothering them. How many of us, inclined by the unspoiled clarity of our spontaneous perceptions to sense some one of those reciprocal relations between truth and beauty, whereby the mere presence of the one testifies to the involvement of the other, have been TWELVE HUNDRED DOLLARS AT SKINNER'S. HE HATES HIS OLD OUTFIT SO. frightened or ridiculed into a conviction of the depravity of our tastes? And how many of us have, in consequence, grown up believing that art, instead of being a normal function of human life, was an abstruse department of esoterics ? VEN George Moore, who is not now thought to lack the courage (some would say the impudence) of his wsthetic convictions, has undergone this benumbing ex- comicbooks.com