The Wasp — 1895 — page 881: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This cartoon satirizes the "New Woman" of the 1890s—a figure representing women gaining independence through bicycling, bloomers (controversial divided skirts), and education. The caption reads: "It shows the inconsistency of man," said the abnormally new "new woman." "What does it?" "He claims the authorities are taking about bloomers. They object to a woman's wearing them." "Yes, and properly." "And the less of them she wears the more they object to it!" The satire mocks both the New Woman's logic and male hypocrisy: men claim to object to bloomers as immodest, yet object more when women wear *fewer* clothes. The fashionably-dressed gentleman represents conventional male attitudes being challenged by the bicycle-riding, bloomered woman. The joke exposes contradictory Victorian moral standards about female dress and propriety.