People Love Firsts

Gender and Racial Firsts Among Cartoonists

Sometimes it’s quite clear when there is a first, other times it’s not. As a cartoonist who is a woman for The New Yorker, I am interested in those who came before me. We can say with some assurance that the first woman to publish a cartoon in The New Yorker was Ethel Plummer, in the first issue of the magazine in 1925. All the other cartoonists in that issue were men, or at least their signatures indicated their gender — not always something one should rely on, but that’s what I am (perhaps wrongly) doing here. Gender identity and sexual preference was fluid in the twenties (more so than subsequent decades, until recently), so perhaps we will never know for sure.

Ethel was an established illustrator in NYC when she submitted to The New Yorker. She was also an activist feminist, doing drawings like the one below for the cause of Suffrage for Women. This was a poster that hung around the city, often at movie theaters and the like, with the caption below it.

“You ask us to attend shows with you, and join you for dinner, and marry you, so why don’t you ask us to vote with you?”

She was active in an exhibition, Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture by Women Artists for the Benefit of Woman Suffrange Campaign at the Macbeth Gallery. Plummer was…