Called for Jury Duty

Charles Dana Gibson lines up roughly a dozen citizens summoned for jury service, rendered in his characteristic dense crosshatch. The group stretches horizontally across a dark-backed courtroom anteroom: a stout, bespectacled man gestures at the viewer; a stooped elder clutches his hat; several men in pinstripes and fedoras crowd the frame. Among them stand two or three fashionably dressed women—cloche hats, patterned coats, heeled shoes—in the jury box. The visual joke is generational friction: male jurors look variously puzzled or amused by their female counterparts. Gibson's satire is light but pointed—women have won the vote and now occupy the jury box, whether the old guard approves or not.