The Wasp — 1895 — page 587: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This cartoon satirizes marital gossip and assumptions. A man confronts a woman with a baby carriage, saying he's "not an admirer of the new woman." The woman replies that she thought, based on reading his divorce case report, that *he* was the one seeking a divorce. The joke hinges on a misunderstanding: the man has apparently been labeled as modern or progressive ("new woman" being early 1900s slang for independent, unconventional women), when actually the court records suggest *he* initiated the divorce. The satire mocks how public divorce proceedings become fodder for gossip that spreads inaccurately through society, and how reputations get twisted in retelling. The page is primarily filled with period advertisements below the cartoon.