In November 1976, a new comic-strip hero made her debut in newspapers around the country. Cathy—an energetic and assertive single career woman with a mocking sense of humor— was clearly a product of the women's liberation movement of the early 1970s. As society's expectations of women were beginning to change, Cathy was the woman caught in the middle, trying to be both strong enough and soft enough, to be both clever and capable at her job and thin and fashionable for her dates. Cathy's witty solutions to her problems have caught the attention of readers for over two decades. At the beginning of the twenty-first century she had appeared in fourteen hundred newspapers around the world, twenty books, and several television (see entry under 1940s—TV and Radio in volume 3) specials.

Cathy's life is a hectic and goofy whirlwind of work, shopping, dating, dieting, and dealing with her...