Next up in my series of short profiles of women cartoonists of The New Yorker is Barbara Shermund. She is my favorite artist from the 1920’s, in part because she was a groundbreaker. And so funny!
Shermund was born in San Francisco in 1899, and, following the death of her mother, she moved at an early age to New York city. She was classically trained at the California School of Fine Arts.
After arriving in the city, Shermund started drawing for The New Yorker in 1925, the year it was founded. Her contributions began as paintings for the covers and little spot drawings. Below is her first cover, only four months after the magazine was founded, smack dab in the middle of the Roaring Twenties. I love this cover because, it feels like a representation of women’s freedom. The woman is moving, her hair blowing in the wind; she is content.
When I say Shermund was a groundbreaker, it’s not because of any clear “first.” She was not the first woman, that first goes to Ethel Plummer, the first woman cartoonist in The New Yorker in 1925. Shermund was groundbreaking in what she drew and wrote about and how she did it. She gave us a peek into what life was like for a modern, feminist woman in NYC in the 1920’s. Her cartoons are sassy, intelligent, subversive, and she teases men like no one had before.
Here is a great mansplaning drawing.
Shermund pokes fun at the institution of marriage in many of her drawings.
As we look at and read Shermund’s cartoons, it’s almost as we are evesdropping on women’s conversations. Women have always been funny in private; but until recent history, we didn’t share it —some would say we weren’t allowed to! Shermund was showing us how funny women could be, but for a mixed readership at The New Yorker.
Shermund wrote all her own ideas, and her breezy and loose drawing style reflects her tone. I feel like her art and her words dance together beautifully.
