Do Women Cartoonists Draw Differently?

Politics have always played a central role in Liza Donnelly’s cartoons. Sometimes it’s subtle. And sometimes it’s not. 

She started drawing at an early age, and was making cartoons by age 7, mostly to make her mother — who stayed home, as a housewife — laugh. “As an adult myself, I can now look back and see that as a woman in the ’40s and ’50s, my mother was never able to live her full life. Instead, she did what women were supposed to do back then, which is to get married and have a family,” says Donnelly. “I’m not saying she didn’t want a family, but it was a feeling I had, that, perhaps, she felt unfulfilled. So I drew cartoons to cheer her up.” 

Donnelly describes her mother as “artistic and funny.” After her mother’s death, Donnelly came across drawings her mother had done. That was a surprise, since the two had never drawn together. “She’d put that part of herself aside,” Donnelly said. “If she lived in another time, who knows what she would have been?”

Donnelly, on the other hand, went on to have a 40-plus year career at The New Yorker drawing editorial cartoons in her signature minimalist, deceptively simple style, all while tackling the most complex topics: feminism, marriage, divorce, global injustice, and human rights.

“When I was starting out, I only drew men,” she admits. “It wasn’t until the 1990s that I realized I could make the speaker a woman.” 

Perhaps that’s because she came of age in the 1970s, when second-wave feminists were in the midst of a struggle to be heard. Growing up in Washington, D.C., she was also influenced by the Watergate scandal. “I wanted to be the [Washington Post] political cartoonist, Herb Block, who brought down Richard Nixon with his work,” she says. 

In fact, she recalls visiting The Washington Post as a teenager, and meeting some editors there — “My father was an internist in town and he knew many people because of his practice, which is probably how I got in the door,” she says. “But I was so young, quiet and shy that I began to think that political cartoons as they were then — strongly opinionated and all drawn by men — were not compatible with what I wanted to do.” 

It wasn’t until Donnelly was in college that she began looking closely at the cartoons in The New Yorker. “I saw that many of them were political in a different way — more indirect but just as effective. So I decided to focus on getting in there.” 

Donnellly sold her first cartoon to the magazine in 1979, then she sold another one — about a man wondering if he pets dogs enough — in 1982. Soon after, she sold her third New Yorker cartoon, and it was overtly political: a drawing about the 1984 presidential candidate Walter Mondale.  

Back then, Donnelly continued to feel hesitant about sharing her political views openly, and so when it came to her drawing, “I kind of came in through the side door.”

Now, Donnelly walks boldly in through the front door. 

Her style is still minimalist, but many of her cartoons are unabashedly, unapologetically political, along with her writing about current events in her popular Substack Seeing Things. With the release of her new documentary “Women Laughing,” directed with Kathleen Hughes, she can now call herself a filmmaker. 

The premise of “Women Laughing,” which opens a run in New York this Friday and will be at select venues in the U.S. through early December, is simple: A group of New Yorker cartoonists, all women, sit around a table and engage in a free-wheeling conversation while drawing together at New York City’s storied Algonquin Hotel. 

In Donnelly’s film, the cartoonists, who include Roz Chast, Emily Flake, Sarah Akinterinwa, Liana Finck, Amy Hwang, Emily Hopkins, Victoria Roberts, Arantza Pena Popo, Maggie Larson and  Bishakh Som, sketch as they talk, sharing what it’s like to be a woman in a historically male-dominated field. Much laughter ensues, but there’s also a great deal of poignancy; and yes, signs of progress made by women in cartooning, too.

The Persistent spoke with Donnelly about politics, feminism, and whether there is a women’s way of drawing. (Mixed answers on that one—stay tuned!)

Our interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

What made you want to do this documentary? 

In a way, it goes back to the history of New Yorker cartoons by women — “Funny Ladies” — that I put together in 2005. I’d always known that there were fewer women in this business than men, but I never started asking questions about it until the early 2000s. Those questions prompted me to do that book, which is about women cartoonists at The New Yorker from 1925 to 2005. 

By 2017, however, it became clear to me that things had changed. That’s when the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, hired Emma Allen as cartoon editor. By that point, the numbers of women and men cartoonists [at the magazine] were more equal, so it was time to do a new edition of my book, “Very Funny Ladies,” with new cartoonists and a new forward. I thought I was done — that little glass ceiling had been broken. But then, during the pandemic, I thought, What about a documentary? 

The structure of the film couldn’t be more simple, with the cartoonists sitting around a table. Why did you approach it like that? 

When our two daughters were young, my husband [the New Yorker cartoonist Michael Maslin] and I used to sit on the floor with them and draw and talk and play. That was the idea for the movie, too. I wasn’t looking to make a film about these cartoonists’ influences or the type of pens they used. I wanted to get at the fact that we are telling the stories of our lives. For generations, women didn’t have the opportunity to do that, and now we do.

There is a lot of laughing in the film, but the conversation also gets serious. Roz Chast complains that even though so much has changed, women still have to “do everything.” She also admits that when she started drawing cartoons, she didn’t want to take up too much space, and so her drawings were small — kind of the opposite of man-spreading on the subway. Sarah Akinterinwa muses that women cartoonists have a knack for making light of their trauma. And Bishakh Som talks about revealing herself as a trans woman through her cartoons. In other words, there’s a lot going on underneath the laughter. Did that surprise you? 

Not really. I mix funny and serious in my cartoons all the time. Cartoons can get to feelings and ideas in a way that words can’t. And that’s clear in the conversations in the film. I’m fascinated with how women cartoonists see the world. In the film, we talk about how we use cartoons to figure ourselves out, and to figure the world out. And everyone rose to the occasion. Plus, we cartoonists work in solitude, and it was so nice to bring everyone together.

At The New Yorker, at least, there are nearly equal numbers of women and men cartoonists. But in the field overall, women make up only 10% to 20% of creators. Why do you think (relative) parity happened at The New Yorker?

If you go back to the 1920s, in certain urban areas, there actually were more women cartoonists than in later years, particularly at The New Yorker [which was cofounded by Jane Grant]. That shifted during the Depression and during World War II. Looking back to the middle of the last century, women were still so confined to the home and to certain roles.

Then, in the late 1960s and 1970s, things began opening up. That’s when women began drawing underground comics. 

At The New Yorker, it was actually a male editor, Lee Lorenz, who brought me in, along with Roz Chast, and two other women. I’ve talked to Lee and he told me that he wasn’t expressly looking for women cartoonists, but rather for different ways to express humor. Then, in the 1980s, Lee brought in more women, like Victoria Roberts. But it was slow.

Was there a notable turning point? 

In 2017, when Emma Allen was hired as cartoon editor, I think women cartoonists saw her in the role and felt more confident that they could submit. 

Given America’s current political environment, do you think there’s a chance that things will go in the other direction for women cartoonists?

The opposite! What I’m seeing is that women cartoonists are feeling angrier, which is making us even more vocal in our work. 

What other kinds of changes are you seeing?

When I started out, drawing explicitly about your own personal experiences wasn’t done — it was more indirect. Now, women cartoonists especially are more specific when it comes to drawing about the experience of being female, tackling subjects like menstruation, dating, and menopause. I really started to see this in the 1990s: Women wanting more space to tell their stories. It wasn’t just about jokes, but about women putting their experiences on the page through cartoons.

At one point in the movie, you ask the group if women draw cartoons differently than men….

Yes! I kind of did it to be intentionally provocative, and everyone groaned. The cartoon editor at Playboy once told me that I drew “like a girl.” That shocked me. I didn’t even know what that meant. But while I don’t want to genderize what we do, it’s also true that you can’t completely remove your gender from your work. I love what the cartoonist Amy Hwang said in the film: “I don’t think about gender when I draw, but I’m sure it’s in there.” That’s such a great line, and to me, it explains the point of the movie perfectly.

Looking back over your career, are there ways that your approach to cartooning has changed? 

In the early days of the internet, I started doing comics for The Nib, and the editor, Matt Bors, encouraged me to be more open about my feelings about women’s rights; and to just respond to the news. #MeToo encouraged me even more. At one time, I assumed that I had to draw about being what I was: a white, privileged woman, which is essentially The New Yorker demographic. But as the internet became a thing, I realized that even if I can’t draw what it’s like to be an Afghan woman, I can draw cartoons that get at what we have in common — being misunderstood, dismissed, raped, all the experiences and the sad things. If I want people to walk away with a message from the movie, it’s that cartoons are an art form, and that our cartoons are not just about trying to make people laugh, but about saying something that means something to us.