Almost 30 years after Sex and the City premiered on HBO, the old “Are you a Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, or Charlotte?” game still reigns supreme at bachelorette parties and girls’ brunches the world over. Yet I never saw enough of myself in any one of those characters to confidently play along. Even the work-smart, man-dumb lawyer Miranda—designed to be manna from heaven for us weird girls—always seemed too confident, beautiful, and all-around empowered to properly capture the complexity and frequent self-doubt of modern womanhood as I understood it.
Happily, the post-SATC television landscape has seen a proliferation of messier-than-Miranda protagonists; think Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s eponymous Fleabag or Megan Stalter’s Jessica from Too Much. But to really understand the origins of modern female flopdom, I’d encourage you to journey back to 1976, when America celebrated its bicentennial; Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer; and cartoonist Cathy Guisewite debuted her award-winning, genre-defining comic series Cathy.
Guisewite’s Cathy comics—recently compiled into a 50th-anniversary collection by Andrews McMeel Publishing—have had (and still have) their critics, who deem the strip’s portrait of a single woman who diets obsessively, argues with her mom, spars with her boss, and constantly despairs over a longtime situationship too sad and specific. But in an era of GLP-1 mania, growing family estrangement, quiet quitting, and breadcrumbing, does Cathy’s worldview have more to say to us now than we’d like to admit?
For Guisewite, Cathy posed a means to parse a complicated sociopolitical moment. “Women of my era lived through such change, and the expectations for women were so different and challenging and new that when I started this strip, it was born out of that confusion and feeling like I had a foot in the old, traditional world and a foot in the new world,” she tells me. “Of course, as I started hearing from women about Cathy, I realized that I was not the only one. A lot of us felt that way, whether it was out loud or secretly.”
There are, of course, Cathy cartoons that just don’t hold up, effectively encapsulating our lowest societal expectations of women. (Did we really need quite so many riffs on the horrors of water weight?) But as a currently fat-and-fine-with-it person who really did once compulsively count calories and google new diets daily, I am frequently flummoxed by the modern imperative to “love yourself!!!” that sits atop a mountain of cultural messaging valorizing thinness. Cathy’s fretting about her weight may not be strictly feminist, but it’s real as hell.
“A lot of times, body positivity just makes everybody feel worse about themselves,” Guisewite says. “It’s harder to express vulnerability now because it’s no longer okay to say you’re not okay with everything about yourself.” At least Cathy is honest about her insecurity, speaking it aloud instead of stashing it under a veneer of faux confidence or corporate-sponsored virtue signaling about how All Bodies Are Beautiful™. (In one strip from 1978, Cathy’s friend, mother, and date all tell her she’s “beautiful in your own special way, Cathy”—setting her up for the obvious, yet weirdly heartrending, rebuttal: “I want to be beautiful in everyone else’s way!”)
Body nonsense aside, as I leafed through the new Cathy collection, I was also struck by its doses of familial sweetness. When Cathy’s not pitying or berating herself, she’s contemplating the contradictions of feminist liberation from a daughter’s perspective or reverting to her child self at her mother’s kitchen table. It’s easy to distill Cathy to her desperate flailing for male affection, but there’s an argument to be made that the comic’s real love story was the one between Cathy and her mother.
Would it have been nice to see Cathy succeed a little more over the course of her 34-year run? Sure. But it’s worth noting that she didn’t stay single forever; Cathy and Irving finally married in 2005, and in 2010 Guisewite’s final Cathy comic revealed that Cathy was pregnant with a girl.
Does Guisewite, now 75, ever think about bringing Cathy back as a mother or even a grandmother? “I don’t think I can take a daily deadline anymore,” she says, laughing. She does think she’ll eventually write something about this current stage of her life—“but it probably won’t be a regular comic strip.”
