EoB #6: "Cathy" Comics

A meandering exploration of how to build a personal brand on anxiety and women's lib

Author

Meredith McManus
September 13, 2023

Before we even dive in I’ll admit, right up front, that I have no idea where I’m going with this week’s issue. The topic itself is Cathy, the iconic comic strip that represented a generation of young women from the 70s to the 00s. But the Cathy comic is a riddle wrapped in an enigma to me. It’s equal parts diet culture, feminism, #TradWife, consumerism, Reaganomics, sexual harassment, financial trauma, and toxic workplace culture - there’s a lot of fertile ground to cover. I know there’s a “there” there, but I don’t quite know what the there is. So, we’ll work to uncover it together, and I promise to keep the number of “AACK!”s to a minimum.

A real-life photo of me trying to write this issue.

The Original Meme

We might as well start at the beginning. In 1976 Cathy Guisewite was 26 years old, working at an ad agency in Detroit and already a VP. Despite all of her early success, Cathy was single and incredibly stressed at work. When she started doodling little comics about her day-to-day foibles, her parents told her to submit them for syndication and almost immediately she secured a contract.

In many ways, Cathy is an OG pre-internet meme. The comic’s recurring jokes about chocolate, shoes, and swimsuit season helped Guisewite build a multi-million dollar franchise of greeting cards, tchotchkes, and books, as well as three animated specials - one of which won her an Emmy. But what may be missed now, when Cathy comics are viewed more pejoratively, is that they were not always seen as vapid or stereotypical.

When publication began in 1976, Cathy was a hit, especially among women from 18 to 30, who finally felt seen. From the beginning, the strip tried to capture the feeling of “being stuck between ‘Betty Crocker’ and ‘Betty Friedan,’ struggling with the expectation to fulfill both the roles of traditional homemaker and independent working woman with equal aplomb.”

As one fan wrote to Guisewite:

She's not pretty, always knows she should lose weight and watch her diet, but is terrific at making excuses... (she) does not have it all together like her libber friend Andrea, but she's trying! She's disappointed, lonely, and is hung up on a typical male. In short, she's one of us.

(It’s worth pointing out that the real Cathy is a former UMich Tri-Delta who was/is objectively thin and good-looking - which is also not to say that her insecurities and struggles with body image are any less valid or real.)

The Four Basic Guilt Groups 🥴

As cringe-worthy as Cathy may be in retrospect, the strip was the first by a young, single woman and gave voice to the feelings of deep anxiety and pressure that “modern women'' of the Baby Boomer generation felt. The main sources of Cathy/Cathy’s neuroses were what Guisewite deemed “the four guilt groups” of life: food, love, family (especially one’s mother), and work.

The Four Basic Guilt Groups

Women should be independent and work outside the home, but they should also keep a clean, organized house. They should be equal to men at the office, but wait by the phone for dates lest they end up an old maid. They should burn their bras to protest the male gaze, but also be sure to get in shape in time for swimsuit season. Shopping and decadent foods like chocolate or ice cream were rewards for getting through another exhausting day of Trying To Have It All.

I’m not saying the “Cathy” strip was particularly feminist, because it wasn’t: The character was obsessed with finding a husband and watching her weight. But Cathy the character and Cathy Guisewite the cartoonist set a precedent in pop culture that the lives of women—especially single career women—were worth exploring.

Jessica Wakeman, Ms. Magazine

Honestly - this doesn’t sound much different than current culture. We’re still obsessed with food and diet, this time through the lens of “wellness” rather than weight loss. We struggle to find love, using shows like The Bachelor as a modern version of The Rules to guide us. We don’t understand our Boomer parents any better than Cathy (a Boomer herself) understood her own. Work is so anxiety-inducing that we have modern-day Cathy’s on TikTok and Instagram highlighting the stressful and absurd day-to-day of corporate life.

@corporatenatalie

My purpose in life is to make Paul happy #corporate #wfh #comedy #performancereview #9to5 #coworkers

Who is @CorporateNatalie if not the Gen Z personification of “AACK!” in the workplace? Isn’t the TikTok “That Guy” trend just Gen Z (and some Millennial) women collectively lamenting gender norms and the hetero-dating experience?

As Susanna Schrobsdorff wrote for Time, “...it’s hard to imagine there isn’t a little Cathy in girls weaned on Instagram affirmations. They’ve already spent more time evaluating their images than their mothers and grandmothers combined.” Is Cathy’s core thesis so different from, say, the Barbie movie? America Ferrera’s monologue about the societal pressures of being a woman is just a more eloquent Cathy aack-fest. We might feel we’re beyond the struggles of 1970’s “women’s lib,” but we’re still living in a neo-Cathy world.

Cathy Inception

In a snake-eating-its-tail style loop, Cathy Guisewite wrote the comic about the struggles of being a modern working woman, causing her to reach an incredible level of success, only to continue to experience the same struggles.

Guisewite earned $50,000 a year from comic syndication when she decided to leave her ad agency job in 1980. While this salary is equivalent to about $250k today and may feel impressive, it’s on par with what Charles Schulz was earning nearly 30 years beforehand when he started the Peanuts comics. Some might argue that the Peanuts have endured for longer and become more embedded in our culture, but were his Snoopy quips objectively better? (As an aside, Schulz and Guisewite were actually friends IRL.)

Maddeningly, despite being a household name for over 30 years, it’s impossible to find any information on how much Guisewite earned from licensing and merchandising. Articles about her from the 80s onward focus on how she’s a single, working woman with body image issues just like her eponymous character! Her tchotchkes were everywhere in middle class suburban homes but the only time money is mentioned in interviews is when the $50k salary is cited as proof that she had really “made it.”

I actually cannot believe that there’s no Wall Street Journal or Teen Vogue article citing Guisewite’s current net worth, but I searched, and here we are - informationless. I haven't even been able to find a single article or press release about her decision to license Cathy to Universal Studios Orlando for a themed ice cream stand. When did this happen? How much was she paid? Ty Warner, creator of Beanie Babies, did less in life and he has a biopic starring Zach Galifinakis and Sarah Snook. (Worth noting that there is no Beanie Baby island at Universal Studios Orlando!)

In 2010, Guisewite retired the comic. Her fans slowly became detractors when, over 30 years, her character never evolved or changed. The world had shifted around her, but Cathy was still as neurotic as the day she was born on paper. An oped in the Gainesville Sun aptly noted, “How many frames of Cathy sitting at her cluttered desk thinking something to the effect of, ‘Aack! I wish someone would put a husband in my in-box instead of all these expense reports!’ did we need before we could consider that subject covered?”

Guisewite may have quit the daily comic, but she never really quit the bit. In 2019 she released Fifty Things That Aren’t My Fault, a collection of short, autobiographical essays that are essentially long-form Cathy strips. Then, during the pandemic, she revived her namesake on Instagram to capture her feelings of exhaustion and overwhelm. The same issues and insecurities she felt in 1976 were still there, albeit with a different background and props. Even under the About Me section of her website - her own space to brag! - Cathy herself lists “Gained and lost the same 20 pounds for fifteen years” as a dystopian accomplishment of sorts. In her 2019 book she quips “Even with all I know and have done, I still measure my self-worth in fat grams.” Truly, the deepest of aacks.

So, what am I trying to say here? Is it that a woman built an empire out of thin air in the midst of the second wave feminist movement, then faded into the mist without so much as a Lifetime biopic or Netflix documentary about her success and genius because she failed to adapt to changing societal norms?

Is it that the medium isn’t the message if the medium is coffee mugs and fridge magnets and the message is the oppressive experience of being a working woman in the 80s and 90s? Or the medium is the message when the coffee mugs and fridge magnets turn topics like workplace sexual harassment into a knowing groan and a laugh between female friends?

I think what I’m trying to say is: wow - it’s absolutely wild that a woman created an enduring personal brand, shot to fame, and then fell out of popularity - all for giving voice and life to the innermost thoughts of the middle class, semi-liberated woman. She both was and was not a feminist trailblazer - and that’s fine.

Guisewite said herself, “My voice is never going to change the world. My voice will help women get through the next five minutes, and I’m fine with that.” I don’t believe Dove is changing the world either, but they sure get a lot of praise for their work. Maybe Guisewite deserves some praise as well for helping to bring issues like body image and self-worth to the table, or for becoming her own Rich Man, decades ahead of her time.

Links! Links! Links! Chocolate! AACK!

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