The Weaker Sex — II

Four Gibson Girls crowd the right side of the composition, their elaborately coiffed pompadours rendered in Gibson's signature dense crosshatching. One holds a magnifying glass over a diminutive male figure standing on a tabletop; a second woman angles a hairpin toward him like a collector pinning a specimen. A third leans in to observe; a fourth watches from behind. Across the table a fifth woman looks on with composed curiosity. The joke inverts the era's assumption of feminine fragility: here women are the scientists, the man an insect under examination. Gibson titled the series The Weaker Sex precisely to puncture male self-congratulation, channeling the period's anxious humor about the New Woman's growing social authority into elegant, ostensibly light draftsmanship.