Women Come of Age in the Newspaper Comics

It may seem like women have come a long way in the comics, with thinking, achieving characters like Cathy now cresting at the top of the strips.

Yet there have been potent females starring in other eras of the industry that started in 1895 with “Yellow Kid.”

By 1901, Jean Carr’s Lady Bountiful appeared as an assertive and independent Gibson Girl. The first working woman came in 1906, “Sally Snooks Stenographer,” by Dink Shannon. More than a half century ago, female cartoonists actually outnumbered males.

Brenda Starr, who hit the ground running in 1940 as a reporter, was created, written and drawn by a woman, Dale Messick. She changed her name from Dalia and mailed her work around after coming up against male editors who didn’t take a woman seriously.

The striking Brenda, who was modeled after Rita Hayworth and named after debutante Brenda Frazier, was as able as any man on the staff of the Globe newspaper, later renamed the Flash.

“Comics have always reflected the popular culture of the day,” says Catherine Yronwode, co-author of “Women in Comics” (Eclipse Books), which details the founding mothers of the cartoon industry. “During the late ‘20s, there was a tremendous amount of syndicated strips featuring female protagonists who were flappers, or showgirls,” among them the legendary Nell Brinkley, a romantic cheesecake beauty created by a namesake artist “who was quite an eyeful herself,” her obituary read.

“Those strips were considered the equivalent of today’s ‘Cathy.’ I think people tend to forget history very fast,” Yronwode says. “These flapper strips addressed issues like women getting the vote, women bobbing their hair, women in the work place as secretaries. Now Cathy is not a secretary, she works in an office, but that mirrors what has happened in society.”

The ‘80s Womanhood

So when Winnie Winkle did stenography and Tillie the Toiler was a part-time office worker and model in the ‘20s, no one was thinking that women were portrayed in lowly jobs. Rather they personified the typical working women of the era, just like real-estate agent Lois of “Hi and Lois” is a character ‘80s womanhood can claim as their own.

“The evolution of women in comics has kept pace with the real evolution of life,” says Bill Yates, a cartoonist who draws “Indian Chief” and “The Small Society.” “Cartoons don’t lead, they follow what’s going on. If the big bomb blew us away and some Martians came in they could tell a lot about our culture and politics through the ages by reading our comics.”

The evolved woman starring in the comics pages these days is generally very much her own person. LuAnn, who started in 1985, gives a sophistication to teen-age girlhood, getting involved with social issues such as coming out strongly against drugs. Both women in “The Middletons,” created in 1982, have careers. Sally Forth juggles family and job. Adam, launched five years ago, is a house husband and his wife is the breadwinner.

“Doonesbury” is in a class all its own.

“Readers today assume the woman works in good jobs, no one is surprised,” says Jay Kennedy, deputy comics editor for King Features, which syndicates all the above, except “Adam” and “Doonesbury” of Universal Press Syndicate.

Elly, the heroine of “For Better or for Worse,” doesn’t fit the picture of an ‘80s superwoman. She is predominantly a wife and mother, yet her character holds great appeal to modern couples because she is real.

She is not beautiful. A hair is permanently sprung out of place. Her kids are challenging, doing things like making an anatomically correct snow man as an aghast mother looks on. Her girlfriend gives birth to a baby that has six fingers on each hand. And Elly feels great conflict about falling short as a good mother.

“She is believable,” says Lynn Johnston, who created “For Better or for Worse” in 1979. “She’s not a super hero. What makes any character lovable is her vulnerability. Super heroes are unattainable. Even Lois Lane, you could never say ‘That’s me.’ And so often I wear my heart on my sleeve and I tell it like I feel it.

‘It’s Therapeutic’

“I don’t mind being vulnerable on the pages because it’s therapeutic,” says Johnston, who lives in Ontario and has two children, 11 and 15. “She makes mistakes. She’s sometimes lovely. She’s sometimes pathetic. She’s sometimes a real heroine. And that’s the way we all are.”

Recently, Elly has entered the workplace part time at a local library where she performs duties like arranging window displays. But don’t expect Elly to eventually become an executive. “I show her being capable at home, more than I show her being capable at work. The personal relationships between people are more interesting to me than being obsessed with your career. Primarily, Elly is a mother.”

During the ‘30s, the tenor of the female strip began to turn toward more fluffy characters. Blondie, originally a showgirl, married Dagwood Bumstead, a millionaire’s son who was disowned for taking a bride “beneath” him. By the onset of World War II, comic women became voluptuous pin-ups for the boys at war.

“Prior to World War II, you had flappers like ‘Polly and Her Pals,’ ” Kennedy says. “Polly wore short dresses, was very independent, she took charge of her own life. Then by the time you get to the war, over all, you saw a regression for women. You were seeing pin-up strips like the ‘Glamour Girls,’ and a bunch of others like that. I think it was for the lonely men in the trenches cut off from American women in a foreign land. You had an idealization of women as a sex image.

“And those pin-ups survived all the way into the ‘60s. Then they just dropped off like flies,” Kennedy adds.

The big burst of women returning to the kitchen in the 1950s with strips like “The Farm Kitchen” by Ethel Hays Simms also began to wane.

Submissive bubbleheads are virtually nowhere on today’s comic pages. Blondie, which along with “Peanuts” is the most widely distributed syndicated strip in the country, may appear to be a ditzy blonde, but a closer look shows just who is boss.

Blondie, age 58, is the one who gets Dagwood dressed. She gives him an allowance and gets him a raise. She is absolute monarch of the house. The continuing thread of humor in many of these vintage strips is that bumbling men are dominated by their women.

Look at old Jiggs, immigrant construction worker turned millionaire, being ruled by his social climbing wife in the 75-year-old “Bringing Up Father.” Maggie wants opera, Jiggs wants to low-life with the boys at the pub. When he comes home drunk, she beats him over the head with a rolling pin. President Reagan has called “Bringing Up Father” one of his favorite strips.

Old Strips; New Writers

Little has changed in “Bringing Up Father” except that in the wake of the death of its creator, George McManus, it is ghostwritten. But by and large, the pushy wife-weak husband gag is a dying hook for laughs on the funny pages. The perpetually brawling, detestable “Lockhorns,” who celebrate their 20th birthday this year, aren’t exactly a model of marriage that couples today absorb with empathy. Bill Hoest, creator of the “Lockhorns,” died in November and his wife, Bunny, will continue the strip.

“The ‘70s brought an another upsurge in strong female protagonists,” author Yronwode says. “We’ve regained the subject matter we had in the ‘20s but of course the jobs being shown now are the better jobs women have in society.”

Landmarks of the onset of the feminist age have been apparent across the comics in subtle and brash ways. When “The Phantom,” that macho superhero who has fought off 52 years of pirates and assassins, finally became engaged to be married in 1977, his choice was no-stay-at-cave type.

He picked longtime companion Diana Palmer, who agreed to the proposal only if he would agree to marry a career woman. Rather than idle away her days in his Skull Cave in Bengalli, she wanted to keep her job as a U.N. administrator in New York and commute between the two cities.

In 1975, a teen-ager became pregnant in the “Mary Worth” strip. Rich Marschall, the country’s leading comics historian, remembers that scenario well. At the time, he was comics editor of the Field Newspaper Syndicate that has since merged with King Features.

“I said to Allen Saunders, creator of ‘Mary Worth,’ ‘Have you ever considered doing something that isn’t a safe theme with a predictable ending, like teen pregnancy?’ ” says Marschall, who is based in Philadelphia and has written 14 books on comics and cartoons.

“And he said--this bowled me over--he had wanted to do a story on that but was afraid the syndicate would veto it. So he did a high school girl who decided to keep the baby. Now we’re talking about 1975, and it became grist for newspaper headlines--’Mary Worth Enters the Modern Age.’ ”

New Frontiers

The following year Cathy Guisewite’s “Cathy” strip was born, and in 1982, lawyer turned artist Greg Howard introduced professional everywoman “Sally Forth.” By 1984, Blondie wore her first pair of pants, and the readers loved it.

Howard’s heroine Sally made him a hero among feminists. Last September, he traveled from his Minneapolis home to receive a Good Guy Award from the National Women’s Political Caucus in Washington. He says his wife wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I don’t make a conscious effort to take a feminist point of view in the strip. It’s just my point of view,” Howard says. “I am married to a woman who wouldn’t permit me to be anything else but sensitive to women’s issues. She first worked as a nurse, and now she is coordinator for the bone marrow transplant unit at the University of Minnesota hospital.”