Chatting with Liza Donnelly

welcome to

this Friday event with Liza Donnelly.

I'm really excited that she was willing to come on today.

Liza is a writer and a cartoonist, and one of my favorite people.

She is

incredibly prolific.

She writes daily at Seeing Things, which is a Substack publication to which I subscribe.

And here's the secret that she doesn't know.

I don't always open her cartoons because I love that they're waiting for me when I can't face the world.

And she has this incredibly light touch with very serious subjects that I find is really helping me getting through these days.

But she's done more than that and is doing more than that.

One of the things we're going to be talking about.

is her new documentary, Women Laughing.

And

somewhere there will be a link to a Kickstarter, or at least we'll tell you how to contribute to that in a Kickstarter.

And that is based on a book called A Very Funny Ladies, New Yorker's Women's Cartoonists.

And so I'm hoping today that we can talk about

what it meant to be a women's cartoonist in the 20th century, primarily through the New Yorker, where Liza appears as well.

Because when we talked about this in the past, we did an event together a year ago.

When we talked about it in the past, You know, I don't think I had really focused on the degree to which getting into the cartooning world for women in the New Yorker and in the 20th century was such an incredible uphill battle, in part because the New Yorker was not bad about introducing female writers like Shirley Jackson, for example, or Dorothy Parker.

You know, there were a number of female writers that were frequently in the New Yorker, but the cartoonists were a really different story, right?

Well,

yes and no.

I think the New Yorker started out as an equal opportunity,

basically, basically,

employer.

And they had, in 1925, when they started, they were started as a humor magazine.

And there were women drawing illustration in that time in New York and some women doing comics.

But Harold Ross, the founder, and Jane Grant, the other founder, they were married,

were just trying to find the best art.

best talent.

And some of those were women.

So there were women in the beginning in 1925.

There were about eight, give or take, eight women drawing cartoons out of eventually out of many more men, like 30 or 40 or 50 men.

So it was always,

they were underrepresented.

But in the 20s, because of that post-suffrage time in an urban, you know, in an urban environment, there was a feeling of freedom for women, but the rest of the country, not so much.

And then in the 50s, as you probably know, we talked about this.

After the war, after the Depression, the numbers dropped off to nothing.

So there were no women drawing cartoons of the New Yorker in the middle of the century.

And you could attribute that to a lot of different factors, but I think it was the culture was getting more conservative.

And

you didn't want to hear from women humorists.

They were too risky.

Humor was a male to me.

So, and then

we came back in the 70s.

It was when I started and Rob's Chad started.

And ever since then,

it's been slowly increasing.

So the numbers now, as of 2017, I know the exact time when there was one issue in 2017 when there were more women cartoonists in the magazine than men.

It's now equal at the New Yorker.

But still, I think humor is considered a man's world in many ways.

Well, I would love to get to that, but let's start back there in the 20s with those early cartoonists, because I know you collect some of them.

And some of them are my absolute favorites.

When I knew I was going to talk to you, I pulled out this image,

which is one of my all-time favorites.

It's Helen Hokinson, and it's those two ladies at an art museum in, I think that's the 20s, is that right?

Yep, yep, 25.

25, looking at a modern sculpture.

Now, what were those early cartoonists up to, the female cartoonists up to in the New Yorker, especially people like Hokinson's one of your favorites, right?

Yeah, Hokinson, my other favorite is Barbara Sherman, who started in 1925 also.

They were just trying to be cartoonists and they were actually because of they were women and they were trying to navigate the city as, you know,

new women, quote unquote.

You know, there's a sense of freedom.

They were drawing about what it was like to be a woman

in that time.

And so we get a glimpse as to what they were doing.

And Barbara Sherman actually, I like them both.

Barbara Sherman, for different reasons, Barbara Sherman was

an early feminist cartoonist.

Many of the cartoons back then, done by women, were not overtly feminist.

They were indirectly feminist.

Now you have a lot of really strong voices and not that Sherman wasn't strong, but strong ideas, loud ideas coming out from women.

It's fantastic.

But back then it was more guys.

The sexist humor,

the feminist humor was a little bit more

indirect and wonderful.

Well, what I like so much about her and that era is her women are older, they're plump, they're clearly trying to be engaged in their world.

It seems to me there's a very clear sympathy for them that I doubt I would have seen from a male cartoonist.

Is that fair?

That's a good question.

I do know that she started out drawing young women in the 20s.

And then she started drawing these matronly heavy set, which I'm hoping to matronly, heavy-set women who, like, like you said, they were curious.

They wanted to go out in the world.

They wanted to explore.

They wanted to do things.

and sometimes they were bumbling sometimes they didn't know what they were doing they were they seemed silly and what's

and that caught on with the public hugely caught on they loved these ladies and she loved she said she's written i loved my ladies um but in the 40s she felt and i read i went to the new york public library for the archives and i read a lot of letters that she wrote correspondence between her and her editor.

And

she felt that her ladies were being misunderstood as the 40s progressed and that they were laughing at these women and not with them.

She said, I love my ladies.

I think

they're wonderful.

And so she embarked on a speaking tour in 1949 to try to explain her ladies to the public.

And she was tragically killed in a plane accident that year.

So she never got to do it.

But that's, you're right.

That's what she's known for is those ladies.

And

what was your question That would have been

a lot of people.

If you think about the way that

the sensibility in those early New Yorker years of the female cartoonists, there is a sense of sympathy with the women, that they are representing the women from their point of view, and they are women who are entering the world, sometimes like your older ladies are, but sometimes like,

you know, in some of your work, I've seen pictures of young women who are taking advantage of the matrimonial scene to advance their own interests, for example.

It's one way to put it.

You might put it differently.

And what I want to ask you next, though, is

when they got read out or written out of The New Yorker, why?

And how?

Because there is this sympathy in the early years, I think, for women being part of this public sphere that then appears to get erased in the 1950s when women cease to appear in the magazine as artists and

are portrayed in a really different way.

That then changes again when you, people like you get involved.

And I'm interested in that transition.

Like we go from this, the 20s where there's sort of support for the idea of women in this role, both as an artist and as a character, to like you just said, she says, nobody understands my ladies.

They're making fun of them in the 40s.

And then we get rid of women cartoonists altogether in the New Yorker.

Well it's a it's a it's a complicated question, complicated answer.

So in the 20s we had Jane Grant who was one of the founders, she was a feminist activist.

She was one of the founders of the Lucy Stone League.

So while Harold Ross, her husband may have been a little bit of an old school male, she, I think her, even though she was not an editor at the magazine, she helped start it.

I think she influenced the tone at the magazine.

So did the sort of the flapper era in New York.

But

so and then and then Ross hired Catherine Angel, who I know everybody knows about,

as an editor.

And she had oversight of the cartoons.

She was not the editor of cartoons, but she had oversight of the, particularly the ones by the women.

So I think her,

and she's a Brent Maher graduate, very sophisticated Bostonian, you know, very high, high, you know, high-floating woman, but a great editor.

And I think she created

an atmosphere for the cartoons or a way of making sure the cartoons were

not sexist towards the women.

And then, you know, I don't like to say that the New Yorker pushed women out.

I don't think that's really quite true.

I think we have a new, Harold Ross died in 51, and then we have a new cartoon editor in 1939

who had a different sensibility.

And cartoons, this is an interesting point.

is that cartoons became so popular and so famous and so well known that men and people like gag riders were flooding the scene, you know?

So they were crowding women out and women were being, women who wanted to be in the business were probably didn't even think of it really, or they, because they were expected to raise children, be domestic, go back to their homes and not become cartoonists.

And then that's when in the 40s and 50s and 60s, cartoons got pretty sexist all over the country.

Not just, I mean, the New Yorker has some really sexist cartoons, but

it was a cultural influence, too.

Well, just to be clear, I suspect a lot of people don't know who Catherine Angel is.

She is the mother of Roger Angel, and she

married E.B.

White, who was also working at the New Yorker.

And they went on to move back to, or to move to Maine, not back to Maine, to move to Maine.

And they were the parents of Joel White, who is the guy who started

the renewal of the concept of building wooden boats in the the state of Maine.

And that's the wooden boat hat I wear.

So everybody is kind of like involved in this cultural moment in that period.

I mean, they're just, the New Yorker is not just about New York in the 1950s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s.

So I didn't realize that there was that shift over that era with Ross leaving in 51 or dying in 51 and a new editor and pushing people out.

It does speak to that moment.

Well,

Ross

was

followed by William Schaun, who was a great editor.

It was the cartoon editor that I think his sensibility was

less sensitive to the women's point of view.

And he just had his gang of guys.

And

maybe he was not as comfortable working with the women.

I don't know.

But I don't think it was a decision by anybody to say, let's get the women out of here.

You know, I don't want to be that sharp on it.

So tell me about you getting involved in the field and how things changed in the 70s.

Well, the 70s,

again, it's following like this, a wave of feminism after the second wave of feminism.

There was a feeling that we could do anything among certain demographic, right?

So I thought I could do anything and I wanted to be a cartoonist.

I started, I knew about the New Yorkers, started submitting them cartoons to them.

And

again, a new cartoon editor, Lee Lorenz, who was looking for, he started in 73.

And he was, I interviewed him from my book.

He was looking for new ways to express humor.

And when you do that, you get lots of different points of view and you bring more diversity into the situation.

So he was not looking for a women cartoonist by any means.

He told me that, but he was looking for new ways to express humor.

So he found Ross Chast.

And then he brought me in and Nero Carlin and some other people, Victoria Roberts.

And slowly

the numbers of women creeped back in.

So, yeah.

Do you remember the first cartoon you sold in the New Yorker?

Oh, of course.

Yeah.

What was it?

It's a complicated one.

I mean, it's hard to describe because it's, I just got out of school.

I was an art major.

And it's,

I don't know, in art, you learn that.

Paul Cézanne had, he had theories of art.

He had a theory that all people have to draw, learn how to draw three things, the cone, the sphere, and the cylinder.

And if you can draw those three things, you can draw anything.

So

I have a, it's a captionist cartoon.

I have a cone, a sphere, and a cylinder, and then a TV set.

So that was the joke.

It was a twist on,

that's what cartoons are often a twist on

a cliche sound.

Anyway, I don't want to talk so much about myself, Heather.

Well, I'm sorry.

I'm back.

So the thing is,

I ought to warn people about this.

Even when people are interviewing me, I am really interested in other people.

I'm not that interested in myself.

I know what I think.

So

you're fascinating.

I love, I got on Substack.

I found you immediately, got hooked, and you actually inspired me to write every single day.

I write and draw on my Substack.

It's not just,

and

I, you continue to be an inspiration to me because

we had a conversation

when we first met and you said to me all I want to do is get a Democrat elected this is before the election and I thought wow that's powerful that's committed and I had no idea how committed you are and particularly now and so your

your energy rubs off on me that I really feel like I have to do something with this substat so I write about politics as well every day or almost every day yes and it's and the cartoons make it all the, I mean, cartoons to me is a, I think of it in the, in the older sense of cartoons, you know, the way that the great masters used cartoons as a, as a way to sketch out

the basis for their masterpieces, you know,

you know,

which

because because, you know, otherwise it sounds, you know, sort of like the old Nancy cartoons or whatever.

But yours, yours do that too, where you get yourself into

a really hard topic.

But as I say, with these light colors and these light, this light way of approaching it.

I am interested in the,

you know, and I guess we don't really have time to go in this now.

And I feel like we probably ought to tip our hands that we are working on a project together.

that I hope we'll do a lot more of these where we can actually explore the things we're working on.

But one of the things that's bothering me today is I do like to write every day because I'm keeping a daily record.

And I think it sort of builds a community because you talk every day.

Right.

And this actually,

I don't think I've ever said this to anybody before except perhaps my husband.

I learned about this when I lived in London for a year.

And I'm not a TV watcher.

I just, I've never been interested in TV.

I kind of grew up without it, never really cared a lot about it.

But when I was in London, there were these 20-minute soap operas on TV.

And just for 20 minutes a night, or a day, actually, they were on twice a day.

You could watch these people.

But the trick that I discovered was that if you didn't know anybody there, you got really wrapped into their lives.

And you didn't want to miss a day because that's how the story progressed.

And if you did miss a day, you would miss something that happened in each of their lives.

And that's where I got the idea that if you were going to keep a record of the United States, you needed to do it every single day, because otherwise, you know, Vincent might have, you know, had a car accident and you didn't hear it.

No, and I love that, that's that's great.

And I love the fact that a soap opera is what inspired Kelly Pox Richardson to do what she's doing now.

Well, wait till I tell you how I learned, how I got the idea for how to write West from Appomattox, which was from romance novels.

Anyway, but in a day like this, it's all stories.

It's people's lives, right?

That's what we do.

We write about people's lives.

Well, my problem with that book was that I was trying to tell a very big story over a long period of time, and I had no models for that.

And I got absolutely absorbed in romance novels to the point that I actually wrote one.

I've never published it, but I was fascinated by them.

And I started to worry about myself because I was actually a published historian and had a job as a historian.

And I'm like, why am I obsessed with romance novels?

And then I realized that that's what romance novels are.

They're long, you know, I was covering 50 years.

They're 50 years of time in which you're following a certain number of characters and watching how they interact.

And that is absolutely the pattern for my West for mathematics.

Anyway, in a day like today,

the news sucks, basically.

And I don't want to write a piece about the really nasty stuff that's happening right now.

I just don't.

It's a sunny day.

And,

you know, there's been so much heavy stuff.

What do you mean?

Well, that's just, I was going to ask you, how do you deal with the really heavy topics you deal with in such a way that you can represent them in a piece that is as uplifting as you do?

How do you choose what you're going to draw?

I don't know.

It depends on the day.

And I don't do a political cartoon every day.

Uh it it has to strike me as visual.

Um and my cartoons, what you said earlier, uh

you know, I grew up in the 70s, 60s and 70s during the Watergate era.

And I wanted to be a political cartoonist back then.

And I'm off track here for my question, but I think there's a point there.

Her block was great.

He was the Washington Post cartoonist, but

A lot of the cartoons in my in my youth and into my young adulthood started to be more, they were all men, of course.

I don't don't think there were any women back then.

They were very hard-hitting.

They were very loud and

opinionated, very strongly opinionated cartoons, which is fantastic.

I mean, her block, he was not,

he brought Nixon down.

He was not that opinionated, but he got, he skewered Nixon in a great way.

But then it became over time, these cartoons became more about strong, loud opinions about governments and wars and, you know, dictators and all that.

But I wanted to get at politics from the side door.

And with my light line of drawing, I wanted to talk about politics as it affects people and

how cartoons can express what we're feeling.

So I do that sometimes in cartoons that are like New Yorker cartoons where two people are talking and they're talking.

It's indirectly related to what's going on around us in that moment in time, either culturally or politically.

Or I'll sometimes do a cartoon about Trump that is not so much,

I'm not going to put Trump on a toilet seat and have that kind of humor that's just not my style but i'm gonna obscure him in in a visual somehow or at least draw shine a light on something he's doing with a visual um so it's i'm not so much sharing my opinion as i'm trying to show people something

that's what i do but just with words right so have you thought about what have you thought about what you're going to draw today no

Do you want to think about what you're going to draw today?

No, I mean, that's what we talked about that.

Sometimes it's a matter of just draw, starting to draw.

You really just have to start, put pen to paper and

see what happens.

Are we almost done here?

25 minutes.

Do you want to give it a shot?

Sure.

What should I draw, Heather?

Well, I was trying to think about that because

I'll tell you what's on my mind and what I probably will write about today is, I don't know if you saw the Department of Homeland Security has been posting pictures to its website, and not its website, it's to social media.

And last night they did one that's very commonly associated with um

uh

manifest destiny the the 19th century term for uh americans moving westward and absorbing land and peoples with their own particular brand of religion social life economy and and um and political system

and that

there I think people are making a mistake to think that that's what they're endorsing now.

I think they're doing something that is much more serious even than that, that is actually a fascist-based thing.

But I am thinking about images and, you know, the things like from last night, the

thing that Molly White posted about Justin's son, who has put $213 million into Trump-related cryptocurrency projects, showing a picture of one of the

crypto meme dogs

manipulating the White House with strings.

And that reminds me of images from Puck in the 19th century.

I'm thinking about images and politics today, and we'll probably end up somewhere around that.

But otherwise, the news is pretty grim with DOJ talking to Ghillaine Maxwell with horrific stories about

ICE agents

assaulting individuals.

And I just don't know how to do it.

Concentration camps?

Yeah.

Concentration camps.

I mean,

what do do in a day like that?

Do you just start drawing and hope something like someone picking strawberries comes out?

Well, that's where

we wish.

I don't know.

I'm also aware of my audience.

I mean, I have to be aware, as you do, like what their tolerance is.

And I don't want to draw Trump every day.

I want to mix it up.

So I mix it up with cartoons that are not political.

So I don't,

I

that's where words come in helpful with the writing is I will write about the serious stuff that's going on and link to the whatever the homeland security or the concentration camps or or

delay max wealth

and then do a cartoon that might be related.

And as I'm writing, probably I'll think, I'll think about that.

Maybe it'll be something about, but

I can't draw about

sex trafficking.

I just can't.

I mean, I've drawn about rape, but

it's hard to get at.

It's really hard to access that stuff.

And you got to ask yourself, why are you doing this?

What's the point of drawing?

Are you trying to say something that's helpful or not just be salacious, you know?

So

that's a complicated answer.

There's no real, I mean, like you're writing, there's no, I feel like there's no.

formula.

If there were a formula, we'd be much richer.

Well, I'm sort of hoping that you will take us out with a drawing.

Is that too much to ask?

Nope.

Let me take this down and see if I can.

If I flip my, I don't know if I flip my.

Somebody says you should draw the two of us.

So just so you know, all of you, I am, I am working up eventually, not today, to ask Liza to illustrate historical stories I tell,

which I think would be totally, totally cool.

And if I had thought of it, I would have thought of something that happened today in history and I didn't.

So we're kind of

doing that, doing something like that.

But you tell the story as you're telling the story, I'll draw it next time.

Let's do it.

But I don't know.

See, if I turn this around, is that no, that works.

Okay, you're still there.

I'm still here.

Yeah, but I turned my camera around and I'm holding it.

So, let's see.

I'm gonna draw you, Heather.

I've drawn you before.

I drew you in Maine.

Remember, yeah, and I did a great job drawing like your hand, and then I'm like, I'm done.

This is not good.

I'm not a caricaturist.

No, this is not good.

I don't like that.

What's that?

This is, look at that.

That's something, an old sketch about the pandemic, about the coronavirus.

Oh, how fun that is.

That's great.

Yeah.

And then here's one I found earlier.

A sketch I think I did for a project, the project you and I are working on.

A couple in a covered wagon.

And there's a caption here.

I thought we were going for white wine and fries.

So that,

I mean, that's a sketch, and I actually drew that up.

I remember I drew that up and I sent it to the New Yorker, but they didn't buy it.

Oh, can we keep that for the book?

Sure.

Let's keep that for now.

And I said, I don't know how to draw you, Heather.

You're not easy to draw.

Well, you can chalk that up to me and not you.

I will say, I was just talking to somebody about

a pro, you know, a talk we're giving uh this week or next week or something on

lobsters.

And he had the cutest little images of baby lobsters.

That um, I wish you you could do that because they were like, lobsters are not cute, let me tell you.

So,

do you eat them, Heather?

You must eat them.

I don't know.

I mean, I will, but I don't, I don't.

Do you?

Yeah, I do.

Yeah, I am.

I'm not allergic to them or anything, but, you know,

they're not something that we go out of our way for, which is incredibly ironic because

I wish desperately I loved them.

Buddy's mother loved them and she was in luck, but neither one of us ever.

He's a lobster person, isn't he?

He's a lobsterman.

Yes, he is.

He's a lobsterman, and neither one of us eat it.

That's so interesting.

Yeah, there's a side view view of you in my imagination.

So that approaches you.

There you go.

That looks Thurbor-esque.

Well, thank you.

Oh, somebody says Amelia Earhart was born July 24th, although today's July 25th, isn't it?

It is, yeah.

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to the possibility of doing this live with you somehow.

You telling a story.

You have so many great stories.

You've told some of them to me, people during Reconstruction.

What a fascinating time period.

I didn't know much about it until I met you, and now I've read everything I can.

I'm trying to read everything I can about it.

And I haven't even told you the greatest stuff about the artists, which is

my favorite experiments with art and clothing.

I mean, we get a whole new kind of clothing with the American, yeah, with the American West and the images of the American West.

The idea of having fringe on clothing comes back to the East.

So women start wearing clothing with the, you know, the fringe that was on the leather jackets of the Western cowboys was designed to wick water away from their clothing.

And that comes back to the East.

So women start wearing dresses covered with fringe.

And that's when we get that.

Anyway, on that cheery note, thank you.

Thank you for doing this.

And the documentary is coming out this year, Heather, but we still need help with post-production.

You said I could mention this.

Oh, yes, please do.

We have a Kickstarter.

We still need a little more funding to help with that.

It's called Women Laughing.

And

it's, it's, I'm telling the stories of these women we talked about from the past, but also modern women.

And we're actually drawing together.

I sit across the table from Roz, Chast, and Liana Fink and

Aron Sa Pena Poppo, and I draw with them.

as we talk about what we do.

So my idea was that this is about the creative process and how women's voices, women's stories have not been told through humor by women.

So now they are being told.

But

anyway,

you can donate to our Kickstarter.

And one of the rewards is going to be the video of Heather and I doing that event in Maine last year at our theater.

So we're going to.

So

I'm sorry, Liza.

Could you explain to people like me

where one finds a Kickstarter starter?

I know the word, but I don't know how one finds it.

Yeah, no, I mean, it was new to me until last year.

So

it's on my

where is it?

On my social media.

It's also on my kick on my

sub stack.

But you can go to you can go to kickstarter.com and search for written laptops.

I didn't know that was the thing.

Yeah, yeah.

So

anyway, there's some great rewards and books and prints and

this video with Heather and I from last year talking about women

and cartoonists and how you can change the world by being part of it and drawing in it and spreading your message.

Right.

I just want to add that you had a great video this morning

on

YouTube talking about how we're encouraging people to not feel,

that's one of the great things you do, not feel alone and not feel, not lose hope, and that you can do something.

You don't have to be, you know, go out there and march or, you know, go to your senator's office and complain.

You can do what you know how to do at home.

And that's helping.

So helping change things.

I love that.

We're building this great community.

And that's actually about carrying this country forward.

After

the trouble that we're in now, we have to have a vision for what comes next.

And, you know, if you think about any time a country has recovered from fascism or from authoritarianism, it always, or communism, it always requires our artists.

So, our scientists, for sure, our writers, all of our participants, but certainly our artists.

So, thank you for being here.

And

can we do this again?

I'd love to do it again.

Thank you, Heather.

Super.

Have a nice weekend.

Have a nice weekend, everybody.

Bye, everybody.

Thanks for being here.