Mary Gauerke: The Only Woman Drawing Cartoons For The New Yorker In The 1960s
Reading Liza Donnelly’s Very Funny Ladies: The New Yorker’s Women Cartoonists, there’s no missing how central women artists were in the magazine’s developing years. Harold Ross, The New Yorker‘s founder and first editor, considered three cartoonists above and beyond all of his other cartoonists (their names actually set above all others, in their own category, on a New Yorker memo listing its artist contributors): Peter Arno, Gluyas Williams, and Helen Hokinson. Ms. Hokinson, one of the earliest New Yorker “stars” was joined, in the magazine’s first year by Ethel Plummer (who appeared in the very first issue of The New Yorker), Barbara Shermund, and Alice Harvey. We’ve seen in recent times, a renewed interest in Ms. Shermund’s work (two pieces of note: here and here) — and rightly so. Ms. Shermund (who wrote her own captions) had, to my way of thinking, one of the more powerful points of view among her New Yorker colleagues (not just the women).
Ms. Donnelly’s book goes into great detail as to why the numbers of New Yorker women cartoonists waned (waned is really too poetic — they virtually disappeared) by the mid 1950s. By 1955, only Mary Petty continued to be published, and her contributions, post 1955, were covers, not cartoons.
Mary Gauerke was published just three times in The New Yorker, with her first, in the issue of November 17, 1956, historic, in that it was the only New Yorker cartoon by a woman published in the second half of the decade. She again made history, with her cartoons published in April 13, 1963 and October 16, 1965, as the only cartoons by a woman published in the entire decade of the 1960s.
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Here’s a good piece, and the only news piece, about Ms. Gauerke from the Finger Lake Times, March 21, 2020 by John Marks.
For a full understanding of the history of women cartoonists in The New Yorker, Liza Donnelly’s aforementioned Very Funny Ladies is essential reading.