The Ladies Who Sketch

In celebration of Women's History Month, howzabout we check out some examples of women cartoonists of the 1920's?

from Cartoons Magazine, August, 1921

Cartooning has long had a reputation for being a male-dominated business, probably because of all those men hunched over drawing boards, but there have always been women among the ink-stained wretches. And not just to clean up after them.

Fay King was one of the most prominent of the bunch. She launched her career at the Denver Post at the age of 23 in 1912, drawing a regular cartoon panel and interviewing celebrities. A celebrity in her own right, her 1916 divorce from boxer and small-town mayor Oscar "Battling" Nelson was in all the papers.

"Flu Stories" by Fay King in San Francisco Call, 1918

King wasn't shy about appearing in her own cartoons; that's her caricature of herself peeking in from the side of the frame in this cartoon during the "Spanish flu" epidemic of 1918-19.

"Women Now read Newspapers" by Fay King, May 1, 1928

Nor was she shy about self-promotion; her name appeared prominently in the headline over her cartoons. (And there she is again at the newspaper stand.) She wrote articles to accompany her cartoons – or maybe it was the other way around — letting everyone know what Fay King observed, advised, remarked or said.

"Women Made Valentino Noted" by Fay King, 1926

Think she forgot to include herself in this cartoon? Nope. There she is, right next to her signature. 

Perhaps it will surprise you to learn that there was a select society of other women who, like King, found in cartooning a "promising and lasting success for women." I'm sure King was not being desperate for company when she explained in the above advertisement for Federal School of Illustrating and Cartooning: 

"It does not matter if she gets to weigh 200 pounds, has three chins and fat ankles. While her work meets with popular demand, she can continue as long as her ability and ideas hold out."

"Cap Stubbs" by Edwina Dumm for George Matthew Adams Service, March 11, 1922

Edwina Dumm started her daily comic strip, "Cap Stubbs" in 1918 after a few short-lived cartoon projects. This cartoon, however, lasted until 1966. Along the way, Tippie the dog was added to the strip's name, then got top billing, and eventually Cap's name was dropped from the strip title. 

"Cap Stubbs" by Edwina Dumm, March 16, 1922

Trade publication The Fourth Estate paid Dumm, who signed her strip with her first name, this clumsy compliment in their May 7, 1921 issue:

When “Edwina’s” identity is revealed to anybody who has studied her comic strip, the usual comment is: “Impossible! A girl couldn’t draw such a good strip about boys and dogs!” “Edwina” has been drawing ever since she was a child. Although she has just passed her twenty-second birthday, she has had a great deal of newspaper experience, as her comic strip “Cap” Stubbs, featuring the funny dog “Tippie,” has been syndicated for several years by the George Matthew Adams Service and has appeared in newspapers all over the country. 

"Cinderella's Dream" by Juanita Hamel for Newspapers Features Service Inc., March 18, 1922

A female cartoonist drawing about a little boy and his dog may indeed have raised eyebrows a century ago. What those eyebrows had been expecting were cartoons like the ones Juanita Hamel drew for the "Women's Features Page" of major newspapers: romantic fantasies and other heart-tugging fare told here in a single panel above a very short story.

"Mother's Memory Babies" by Juanita Hamel, Dec. 14, 1921

Hamel started her career at the St. Louis Times and Chicago Herald before getting syndicated by Newspapers Features Service out of New York. "Frequently I have been asked how I happened to take up art," she told an interviewer in 1923. "As a matter of fact, art took me up. I was raised in an atmosphere of art. I remember the work done by my grandmother — paintings of the Civil War time, with the atmosphere of real romance, and this with the stories of adventure and hardships endured by the pioneers of the middle west imbued me with the desire to paint."

"The Triumph of the Green-Eyed Monster" by Nell Brinkley for International Features Service Inc., Jan. 1, 1921

If romanticism isn't your thing, Nell Brinkley here gives us an example of another topic open to the fairer sex: Sunday School morality tales. "Poor little Dan" in this story, pays the price for entrusting his safety to two adults and their pet dragon, Jealousy. 

Brinkley drew romantic vignettes, too, of course. But perhaps she was in a particularly foul mood that day.

This second cartoon topped a full-page story by Brinkley.

"Four Things Too Wonderful" by Nell Brinkley in New York American, Aug. 29, 1926

In addition to the ladies shown above, notable women cartoonists of the early decades of the 20th Century included Emma Gordon, Ethel Hays, Virginia Huget, Alice McKee, Lou Rogers, Eleanor Schorer, Edith Stevens, and Dorothy Urfer. Trina Robbins, author of The Flapper Queens: Women Cartoonists of the Jazz Age, observes: 

“There’s this myth that women didn’t draw comics or that they had to change their names; this is untrue. If you were good, they published you. Women were drawing comics and people loved them. Just as many women read newspapers as men, and the editors were smart enough to carry the strips the women liked.”

✍

P.S.: The New York Times yesterday printed a very belated obituary for "flapper cartoonist" Barbara Shermund (1899-1978), whose cartoons appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, the original Life, Colliers, and Pictorial Review. Definitely worth a look-see.