Funny Ladies ─ The New Yorker's Greatest Women Cartoonists And Their Cartoons

Liza Donnelly, herself a renowned cartoonist with The New Yorker for more than twenty years, has written this in-depth celebration of the rich history of women's humor and the women cartoonists who have graced the pages of the famous magazine from the Roaring Twenties to the present day.
In addition to being an anthology of funny, poignant, and entertaining cartoons, Funny Ladies offers a unique examination of twentieth-century American history as it relates to women. Donnelly explores how, using cartoons as mirrors on society, it is easy to trace women's roles in society by seeing how these women voiced their opinions and expressed their concerns on key social issues of the time. Early innovators in the twenties and thirties, like Helen Hokinson and Barbara Shermund, depicted women as working and independent, yet by the fifties they, and other cartoonists, returned to perpetuating existent stereotypes of women. However, beginning with the second wave of feminism in the 1970s and continuing to the present, female cartoonists, like Roz Chast and Liza Donnelly, are no longer confined to "female" subject matter but rather are able to show the world around them in their own human voice.

Liza Donnelly (Rhinebeck, NY) has been a cartoonist for The New Yorker for twenty-six years. When she started, she was one of only three women cartoonists being published by the magazine at that time. Ms. Donnelly has written and illustrated a series of children’s books about dinosaurs and has edited four collections of cartoons, including Mothers and Daughters, and, with Michael Maslin, Fathers and Sons, Husbands and Wives, and Call Me When You Reach Nirvana. She has also contributed cartoons and illustrations to The New York Times, The Nation, Cosmopolitan, and many other national magazines.