Life — April 6, 1916 — page 17: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This is a single-panel cartoon satirizing gender and vice. The scene shows a social gathering where one man boasts to another about his wife's virtue, claiming she doesn't smoke or indulge in any vices. The punchline—"No, she only drinks and swears"—inverts the expected moral hierarchy of the era. The satire targets early 20th-century hypocrisy about women's "propriety." While smoking was considered scandalous for women, the cartoon suggests drinking and profanity were somehow acceptable or overlooked substitutes. The joke reflects contemporary anxiety about changing women's behavior and the gap between public respectability and private conduct. The artist's signature appears lower left, though the name is unclear in the image.