The Weaker Sex

Four Gibson Girls crowd around a tabletop where a tiny, fully formed man—no bigger than a hatpin—stands helpless while one woman pins him like a specimen and a second trains a magnifying glass on him. A third and fourth woman observe with cool, scientific detachment. Gibson's caption makes the joke explicit: the miniature male "imagines himself the latest victim of some fair entomologist." The role reversal is the entire argument. These tall, self-possessed women—the very Gibson Girl ideal of educated, socially confident femininity—have colonized the masculine posture of rational inquiry and reduced the courting male to an insect. The cartoon belongs to a decade of anxious humor about the New Woman: men satirizing female ambition while simultaneously glamorizing it, unable to decide whether to admire or fear what they had drawn.