Life, 1913-07-10 · page 15 of 44
Life — July 10, 1913 — page 15: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
The top image satirizes the obsession with athletics by depicting a female athlete figure as a deity in a grand stadium, crowned and worshipped—mocking how American institutions elevate sports to pseudo-religious status. The text below, "Why We So Seldom Take Our Women to the Ball Games," presents mock-naïve questions supposedly asked by women at baseball games. These aren't genuine confusion but **sexist satire**: they ridicule women as intellectually incapable of understanding sports terminology and rules. References like "bunt," "single," "whitewashes," and "bags" are baseball jargon presented as if women comically misinterpret them. The humor relies on 1910s-era stereotypes portraying women as ignorant outsiders to male domains. The illustration captioned "First Aid" shows women with food/refreshments, reinforcing the period's assumption that women belonged at games only for domestic/social purposes, not as genuine sports fans. The satire aims at both institutional absurdity (athletics worship) and gender exclusion from sports culture.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
THE APOTHEOSIS OF ATHLETICS BY PROXY SUGGESTION FOR MURAL DECORATION FOR THE NEW HOME OF THE AMERICAN SOCIFTY FOR THE PERPE: OF TYPICAL INSTITUTIONS Why We So Seldom Take Our Women to the Ball Games “I'M always glad when our team is in the field, because they do that so much better than batting.” “Is a bargain matinée the same as a sacrifice?” “What is the difference between ‘one little bingle’ and ‘a small, juicy single’?” “T thought you said last Fall that a bunt was kicking a foot-ball.” “When one team whitewashes the other, which are the bleachers?” “Are they really so tired that they go to sleep on the bags?" “When a player strikes out, that makes him a fan, doesn’t it?” “Then why don’t they call a right-handed pitcher a northpaw?” “Why does Tesreau always kiss the ball in that af- fectionate way? “T thought the papers said that Meyers died at the plate yesterday. But he’s playing to-day.” FIRST AID comicbooks.com