Before isolating and studying several strips created by women from 1976 to the present, it is beneficial to gain an understanding of the context of the strips within the entirety of the newspaper comics pages. Thus, I chose a random selection of comics pages from my local paper, the Oregonian, on December 5, 1984, a date several years after the debut of Cathy and For Better or For Worse, and set out to survey the landscape of the newspaper comics pages. On Decem-ber 5, 1984, the Oregonian newspaper featured thirty-six comic strips (four of the single-panel variety) over two pages, which also featured the “Wonderword,” “Isaac Asimov’s Super Quiz,” the “Star Gazer”
astrology guide,” and “Jumble: That Scrambled Word Game.” Thirty-three of the strips were created by men and Thirty-three by women: Sylvia by Nicole Hollander, Cathy by Cathy Guisewite, and For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston. Six of the comics featured female charac-ters in the title, such as Winnie Winkle, Mary Worth, Hi and Lois, and Blondie. None of the strips were authored by self-identified people of color, and, at least on this day, the only person of color depicted was one character on the bowling team of Motley’s Crew, although some of the strips did have characters of color appearing on other days at that time, such as Franklin on Peanuts. Featured within the strips, there
are forty-nine male characters, thirty female characters, and ten ani-mal or child characters of no identifiable gender.4 A closer analysis of the behaviors of these characters reveals further patterns, sugges-tive of this particular time and place in American culture. The male characters in these strips primarily participate in active pursuits; they are depicted bowling, drawing, playing sports, putting up Christmas lights, skateboarding, and conducting an exorcism (Bloom County).
The men serve in the military, both the contemporary army (Beetle Bailey) and the ancient French Foreign Legion (Crock). They are cow-boys in the old West, (Catfish), Vikings (Hagar the Horrible), monks (Fenton), and “house-husbands” (Adam). The males drink and talk and work in offices.
Notably, two men actively care for children. In Winnie Winkle, William “Billy” Wright (aka “Mr. Right”) is pictured in the first panel of a four-panel strip kneeling before a young boy and wonder-ing, “What’s a cute little fella doing all alone in a sleazy place like this?” The boy plaintively responds, “Da da?” In the second panel Billy responds, “I’m not your Daddy, but surely you belong to some-one,” before cuddling the boy closely in his arms. In the final panel Billy ushers the boy out the door, promising to find the boy’s “per-son” and keep him “out of trouble.” In subsequent daily strips it is revealed that the boy is Darren Sutton and his mother, Patricia, was abandoned while pregnant and is now working to take care of her son but is not, apparently, doing a good job of it. Billy warns Patricia to find more reliable care before stepping in himself. Although the context isn’t apparent from this strip alone, it is clear from this exam-ple that the strapping, fair-haired man acts as the rescuer of lost chil-dren, swooping in protectively and comforting the boy in the absence of his mother. In her pointed nonappearance, the mother represents neglect. With women in the workforce and out of the home, the child suffers and must be rescued by the man.
Adam presents another contemporary development as women flooded the workplace, with Adam taking on the role of “house-husband” while his wife Laura works. In this particular daily strip, Adam walks outside and complains to a male friend who is push-ing a stroller with a small child’s head visible. Adam shares that his
4. The anthropormorphized birds of Shoe are counted as being clearly demar-cated as male, while the bears of Bears in Love are not counted according to gender.
Clearly, this rough count only provides a quick insight into the context of a repre-sentative comics page, rather than a strictly coded formal analysis.
wife feels that he’s taking “the role of house-husband too lightly” and that he doesn’t “keep the house clean.” Adam’s friend suggests that Laura “just wants you to be responsible. There’s nothing wrong with that.” Adam agrees, and the final panel depicts him home alone, with a telephone to his ear, the speech balloon indicating his call: “Hello:
Dial-A-Maid?” Adam chooses to take on his cleaning responsibilities by outsourcing them to a maid, almost certainly female, rather than simply doing the work himself. While this strip jokingly critiques Adam’s interpretation of his friend’s call to “be responsible,” it also, once again, suggests that it is the female’s absence from the home environment that has caused this problem and created this friction by upending the traditional family dynamic. Furthermore, there is a sense that Laura is being unreasonable in her demands of Adam the
“house-husband.”
Although Andy Capp does not demonstrate a caring, masculine side, the strip similarly criticizes an absent female. In the four-panel strip, Andy is first seen in profile at a bar with an empty glass, his face resting in his hands and his plaid hat pulled low over his eyes.
In the second panel, Andy rouses and points toward an unseen char-acter, asking, “Are you going to buy me one, Suzie?” The third panel shifts to an image of the three taps, a large speech balloon dominat-ing the top half of the frame. The absent female figure responds, “No!
Y’Should be ashamed of yourself . . . scrounging off a woman?” The final panel shifts the focus once more to Andy, returned to his origi-nal position at the bar, although this time he turns his face to address the audience, commenting, “Great, isn’t it? You give them equality and they throw it back in your face.” Andy argues that equality for women was a gift bestowed upon them by men, and that this benevo-lent gesture has been turned against males in a viobenevo-lent gesture, as shown by this particular man who fails to procure a drink from a female bartender. The absent woman stands for all women, ungrate-ful shrews resorting to hostility and utterly unappreciative of the male offering of equality.
One very notable omission from this discussion is Doonesbury, which did not appear in the Oregonian, but did feature numerous female characters and directly supported Women’s Liberation. In particular, the character Joanie Caucus came to stand as a symbol of the feminist movement since her first appearance in September 1972, when she argues with her husband regarding her feminist beliefs.
Joanie leaves her husband and two children and enrolls in law school
and remains an outspoken advocate for women’s rights throughout the run of the strip. Kerry Soper argues that Joanie is “perhaps the most sympathetic female character” (Garry Trudeau 160) in Doones-bury and that “her dramatic character arc allowed her to represent a shifting zeitgeist” (160). Interestingly enough, Soper notes that Joanie’s flaws and doubts encouraged the audience to sympathize with the character, making her feminist beliefs more palatable:
It seems that Joanie would not have resonated so well with read-ers if she were less ridiculed with doubts, contradictions, and funny foibles. The fact that she radicalized herself and became a success in the world of law while still being self-deprecating and insecure, made her seem less strident in her feminism. Readers could thus identify with her struggles and see her as an individual first, and an icon of a movement second. (162)
Thus, Soper posits that it is Joanie’s insecurity that endears her to the audience and renders her feminism “less strident,” a generous perspective that did not seem to be applied to other female comic strip characters like Cathy, who was soundly criticized for her foi-bles. Regardless, Trudeau’s explicit support of Women’s Liberation in the early days of the strip, and feminism in general, marks it as a particularly noteworthy exception to the vast majority of comic strips from 1984 (and beyond), which rarely address feminist concerns, or do so with derision.5
However, unlike Joanie Caucus, the women represented on this day in these pages, when actually depicted, are usually crying, talk-ing on the phone, gossiptalk-ing, worrytalk-ing about their appearance, and occasionally scheming. Their interactions swirl around relationships, emotions, and looks. There are very few professional women, and for the most part, the working women focus on fashion and senti-ment rather than career. On the Fastrack presents an exception, with one woman standing amidst a group of coworkers—simply one of the gang rather than an anomaly—although in the context of the page, she is precisely that, the female character working alongside male col-leagues without comment. The other career women represented on the page are largely place holders: in Beetle Bailey, the General’s
5. For a detailed analysis of Trudeau’s rendering of Women’s Liberation, see Valerie Voigt Olson’s master’s thesis, “Garry Trudeau’s Treatment of Women’s Lib-eration in Doonesbury” from 1982.
retary Miss Buxley and soldier (and office worker) Private Blips serve as foils for a gag between Lt. Fuzz and General Halftrack, and a nurse is praised for her caring in Judge Parker. While it is true that the “Fairy Godmother Dating Service” from Sylvia could loosely be deemed pro-fessional, the service still revolves around dating and relationships.
Office workers Cathy and Charlene spend the strip fretting about their hair, makeup, dresses, and purses as they exit the bathroom before rushing back in, completely flustered by the fact that despite all of their primping, they “look exactly the same.” The women of these pages are not strong and active agents of change—they are gos-siping, conniving, self-centered, and riddled with doubt—if they are actually present. The women here are white and upper-class; this is certainly not a representation of intersectional identities. And while the pages from one randomly chosen day in 1984 cannot be said to represent a year or years of comic strips, it is, I think, significant that this random sampling suggests a snapshot of popular concep-tions of men and women and, furthermore, I would argue, the daily comic pages such as these helped shaped the narrative of gender expectations.