Life, 1913-10-09 · page 4 of 44
Life — October 9, 1913 — page 4: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a pro-suffrage advertisement from Life magazine announcing next week's issue will seriously address women's voting rights—a first for the publication's "absorbingly interesting career." **The cartoon** depicts a boxer in fighting stance confronting a woman in a dress, titled "Will She Succeed?" The image satirizes opposition to women's suffrage by portraying it as a violent conflict, with the woman as an underdog fighter. **The satire's point**: Life claims to finally give the suffrage question "intelligent" consideration with reserved seating for pro-suffrage arguments. The boxer metaphor suggests suffragists face brutal resistance, yet the woman stands ready to fight. **Context**: This appears to be from the 1910s suffrage movement era, when Life positioned itself as editorially neutral while actually supporting women's voting rights through strategic publication choices.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Will She Succeed > Next week’s Lire will decide this great question. In it, for the first time in Lire’s absorbingly interesting career, the Woman Suffrage question will be con- sidered intelligently, and all the argu- ments in favor of Woman Suffrage will sit in reserved seats. Remember there is no string tied to thisnextnumber. Itisa fair and square number of Lire, in which Woman Suf- fragists reign supreme. After that we shall go back to the hope!essly irresponsible condition about Woman Suffrage that we always have been in. Unimportant! We have had to give up jor the time being all thoughts of issuing that Humorous Number. We are prepared to go to almost any extreme when it comes to instituting a reform, or setting anybody else right, but we haven't got courage enough to get out @ Humorous Number. Neither have we got the ma- terial. But what we intend to do ts to issue a Near-Humorous Number. It is the best we can do. This Near-Humorous Number will almost be funny. Be prepared for it. The Pro-Suffrage Number of Next Week We Are Still Firm Extreme pressure is being brought to bear upon us from our Business Department to reinstate the coupon which has appeared in this corner for so many years. The Business Department says that a great many people fill out this coupon and return it with good money to this office, for the purpose of becoming regular sub- scribers (just as if they couldn’t become so in any other way), but we are going to stick it out—no coupon for us. Besides, speaking privately, haven't we got subscribers enough? We don’t want the American peo- ple to become too intelligent all at once. ONE YEAR $5.00. (CANADIAN $5.52, FOREIGN $6.04) comicbooks.com