Life, 1918-05-30 · page 9 of 36
Life — May 30, 1918 — page 9: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This cartoon satirizes a woman caught between competing male interests during wartime. The illustration shows a woman at a table surrounded by three men: one jubilant on the left holding newspapers, one stern in a top hat on the right, and newspapers scattered about labeled with war-related headlines. The accompanying text discusses WWI scenarios—the German Crown Prince's military movements, bombardment of Paris, and Cologne's dispatch operations. The "difficult position" appears to reference how women navigated pressure from various sides during the war: demands for patriotism, economic hardship, and potentially conflicting loyalties. The humor derives from the woman's apparent discomfort being literally "surrounded" by war news and male authority figures—a commentary on women's constrained agency during wartime.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
\\» A Promising Lad Geneva, May. 1.—The German Crown Prince himself has fired sev- eral shots with the gun with which Paris is being bombarded, a Cologne despatch says. He is greatly inter- ested in the working of the guns, and has inspected them frequently. CONGRATULATION But while it ma: kill women and children in a church, is the Crown Prince quite safe only sixty miles away? This reckless exposure of one’s per- . Prince. be amusing to HER DIFFICULT POSITION son might prove disastrous, as the death of a Hohenzollern would be, in- deed, a loss to civilization, Questions That Ought to Be Answered F it took two years to get a man like C. M. Schwab at the head of the shipbuilding plants, how long will it take George Creel to resign? lf Mr. Garfield instructs us to put in our coal at once and our local dealer tells us he cannot supply us, ought we to send a letter to Mr. Garfield, thank- 869 ing him for the great interest he has taken in us? If a burglar enters your house and proceeds not only to rob it, but to mur- der your wife and daughter and then set the house on fire, do you politely look on, refrain from shooting at him and let him go, because you feel that, from the highest motives, you cannot > descend to his own level What is $80,000,000 among airplane friends? OTTO FOR SENTRIES: “They also serve who only stand and wait.” comicbooks.com