I first heard of Barbara Shermund on CBS Sunday Morning and decided to dig a little deeper.
Barbara Shermund (1899-1978) was an American cartoonist. Her work appeared in The New Yorker from its first year in 1925. She was one of the first three women cartoonists inducted into the National Cartoonist Society in 1950.
Shermund’s father was an architect and her mother was a sculptor. Shermund’s talent emerged very early in her life and her parents encouraged her to follow her passion. She attended the California School of the Arts, studying painting and printmaking.
Her first artwork was published when she was nine years old on the San Francisco Chronicle‘s children’s page under the title On the farm.
Shermund’s classical training characterised her style. Her cartoons can be identified by their bold, loose lines. She used pencil and brush; first she sketched a first draft on heavy watercolor paper. Unlike other artists, she did not have a studio and she used to draw at her kitchen table.
In the mid-1920s, Harold Ross, the founder of a new magazine called The New Yorker, was looking for cartoonists who could create sardonic, highbrow illustrations accompanied by witty captions that would function as social critiques. He found that talent in Barbara Shermund. She was one of the first women cartoonist to work for The New Yorker. Her first captioned drawing appeared just five months after The New Yorker began publishing. She created nine cover illustrations and over six-hundred cartoons for the inside of the magazine.
For about two decades, until the 1940s, Shermund helped Ross and his first art editor, Rea Irvin, realize their vision by contributing almost 600 cartoons and sassy captions with a fresh, feminist voice. Shermund loved to draw women. There are several distinct themes that run throughout her work, but none as consistently as women talking to each other.
Her cartoons commented on life with wit, intelligence, and irony, using female characters who critiqued the patriarchy. If someone took themselves—their troubles, their dreams, their tastes—too seriously, they made for the perfect subject. Shermund spoke directly to women of the era who defied convention with a new sense of political, social, and economic independence. “Shermund’s women spoke their minds about sex, marriage, and society. They smoked cigarettes, drank, and poked fun at everything in an era when it was not common to see young women doing so.” *
By the 1940s and ’50s, as America’s postwar focus shifted to domestic life, Shermund’s feminist voice and cool critique of society fell out of vogue. Her last cartoon appeared in The New Yorker in 1944. Much of her life and career after that remains unclear. No major newspaper wrote about her death in 1978. The New York Times was on strike then, along with The Daily News and The New York Post. Her ashes sat in a New Jersey funeral home for nearly 35 years until her niece, Amanda Janes Gormley, revived her legacy.
* Caitlin A. McGurk, Tell Me a Story Where the Bad Girl Wins,
** A 1950s-era cartoon by Shermund in which a little girl requests a different kind of fairy tale from her father.
