Cathy was the first widely syndicated humor strip created by a woman. The strip was pretty revolutionary at the time not only because it starred a female, but also because it was so emotionally honest about all the conflicting feelings many women had in 1976.

Guisewite frames “Cathy” as a landmark not simply for being drawn by a woman, but for centering a woman’s interior life—anxieties, ambivalence, and self-contradiction—as legitimate comic material. By calling the strip “emotionally honest,” she suggests its humor came from recognizing pressures on women in the mid-1970s: changing expectations around work, romance, body image, consumption, and self-definition. The claim of “revolutionary” points to how rare it was for mass-market comics to treat these conflicts as everyday realities rather than punchlines or stereotypes. The quote also implies that the strip’s broad appeal lay in shared recognition: readers saw their own mixed feelings reflected back, validating them through comedy.