The Wasp — 1891 — page 285: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This satirical piece mocks Victorian-era domestic advice for wives. The central oval cartoon depicts a woman performing exaggerated household tasks and domestic servitude—cleaning, cooking, and entertaining—to supposedly "attract" her husband. The surrounding smaller panels appear to show absurd or contradictory domestic scenarios, likely satirizing the unrealistic expectations placed on wives in contemporary etiquette manuals and domestic advice columns. **The satire's point**: The Wasp is ridiculing the era's prescriptive gender roles and the notion that women must perform endless domestic labor to maintain marital happiness. By exaggerating these expectations to absurdity, the cartoon critiques both the advice industry and the patriarchal assumptions underlying it.