The Wasp — 1895 — page 355: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This satirical comic mocks the "New Woman" of the late 19th/early 20th century by inverting gender roles. The central figure is a man who has become a domestic worker after the "New Woman" takes charge of affairs and drives him from his occupations. The sequential panels show his degradation: he's reduced to nursing, laundry work, cooking, and childcare. Panel 6 jokes that a policeman won't sample his cooking. Panel 7 suggests his domestic incompetence ("discouraging to find the master' things won't do for him"). The satire targets women's increasing independence and professional ambitions by suggesting that empowered women would reduce men to servile domesticity. The humor relies on period anxieties about gender role reversal.