“To be able to last this long and to be paid to turn every [personal] ‘disaster’ into money”  is a blessing, Cathy Guisewite said. Guisewite was the writer and creator of the eponymous comic strip. For 34 years Guisewite’s drawn alter ego, Cathy Andrews Hilman, unflichingly represented to loyal female readers the contradictions of life. Through panels of newspapers, the comic strip Cathy created the “four basic guilt groups” of women (Food, Love, Mom and Work), the axis around which life revolves. Cathy burst onto the scene at the height of the feminist movement, her signature “Aack!” standing in for a complex brew of frustration, fear, disbelief, and numerous unnamable other emotions.

On this day. November 22, in 1976, the comic strip that would come to define femininity for a generation of women, Cathy, debuted.

Perpetually single and unlucky in love, with a guilty weakness for carb-heavy food, Cathy gave voice to the women that dared not admit they could fall short of lofty expectations. In an interview, Guisewite said her character gave women the freedom “to admit some things by seeing a character who struggled with some little blunders and dreamed of big things” at a time when “things could be confusing and when you might feel vulnerable.” But she wanted to end on a hopeful note: in the final years of the comic strip Cathy finally married her longtime on-and-off boyfriend, and in the very final strip it was announced she was expecting a baby.