The Weaker Sex. II

Gibson arranges four elegantly coiffed young women—the celebrated 'Gibson Girls,' with their signature upswept hair and bare shoulders—around a flat surface on which stands a tiny, doll-sized man. One woman holds him at pin-point with what the catalog confirms is a hatpin; another trains a magnifying glass on the specimen as though he were an insect under examination. Two further women look on with cool, appraising calm. The joke inverts the Victorian cliché of feminine frailty: here women are the scientists, men the pinned specimens. Gibson's pen-and-ink line is crisp and confident, the women idealized, the man comically reduced. The satire is directed at gender presumption, gently skewering the male self-image at a moment when suffrage and the 'New Woman' were reshaping American social debate.