Life — August 2, 1917 — page 9: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# Analysis of Life Magazine Page 169 This page satirizes educated women and class anxiety during World War I. The poem "Vers Libre" mocks a woman with a Ph.D. who claims expertise in multiple academic fields ("Anthropological, Ethnological, Psychological") yet lacks practical knowledge—the joke being her pretension exceeds her actual understanding. "The Only Solution" presents a middle-class conference advocating the abolition of the middle class itself to solve war burdens. The committee's absurd logic—that eliminating middle-class people would prevent future complaints—satirizes how middle-class citizens bore financial and human costs of war while wealthy people profited. The sketch "Yesterday—To-day" (artist: Angus MacDonall) shows a couple, likely contrasting prewar and wartime circumstances, though specific figures are unclear from the image alone.