Thurber Thursday: The 1st Installment in “The War Between Men And Women”

Thurber’s “The War Between Men And Women” 

One of the many reasons I enjoy visiting A New Yorker State Of Mind: Reading Every Issue Of The New Yorker is that it often either reminds me of a drawing or New Yorker event I’d forgotten, or it serves to educate me. This is one of those educatin’ moments: the very first appearance in The New Yorker of Thurber’s classic graphic series, “The War Between Men and Women.” 

                          Above: The War Between Men And Women, part 14, Rout, published in The New Yorker, April 21, 1934.

This week’s New Yorker State of Mind mentions the beginning of the Thurber series. I had not thought of the series as published drawing by drawing over a period of time. As I’d only seen it in Men, Woman, And Dogs, and The Thurber Carnival, my impression was it appeared all at once, perhaps over a number of pages in a single issue. But nooooooo. Readers had to wait week after week as the series played out over four months and 15 issues, from January 20, 1934 through April 28, 1934.

The series was the the basis for a 1972 film (using the “War…” title), and it appeared, in part, in a sequence mixing live-action and Thurber-inspired animation in the television series “My World And Welcome To It.” 

The opening sequence from the  1972 film, “The War Between Men and Women”

A section of the television show, “My World And Welcome To It” featuring “The War…” (including animation, based on Thurber’s drawings, interspersed with live action)

Thurber briefly mentioned “The War Between Men and Women” here and there in published letters; in one particular case, in a letter, dated May 18, 1960, to Cyrus Durgin, the Music and Drama editor of The Boston Globe.  Writing to Durgin about getting The Thurber Carnival (the play) ready for Broadway he said this:

“On the road we tried out drawings of ‘The War Between Men and Women’ with somewhat longer captions, and all of us loved it, but audiences did not get it, so out it went.” 

The longest section about “The War..” in any Thurber book in the Spill library (that I can locate this dreary Thurber Thursday morning) is found on pages 35-37 in Robert Emmet Long’s 1988 James Thurber. Long, who basically describes what we’re seeing taking place in the series, calls the drawings “one of Thurber’s best-known early parodies set in a series of panels.”  

And finally, from the Dept. of Things I’m Sorry I missed:

In Twaynes Author Series #62, James Thurber, (1964) we learn that “The War…” was once turned into a ballet, presented “at The YMHA’s 1954 Summer Dance Festival.”