It’s funny to me that sometimes on any given day, I go to my vast storage of cartoons and pick something out to share with you, and randomly it is something that works with the news of the day. Like the unpublished one above. I cannot recall when I drew this, but it was several years ago. The above cartoon could relate to the recent climate change bill, which is wonderful news. We have a mess to clean up and I am glad we are heading in the right direction.
I was also riffing off the cartoon stereotype of the man owning a company and passing it onto his son. I am sure if you looked in The New Yorker past issues, particularly from the 1950’s, you’d find a few business owner/son cartoons. It was a sexist era, even in cartoons. I wanted to take this cliche and switch the gender, in part because I can, but also because I wanted to illustrate a certain phenomena. Women often rise to the top of fields/businesses when said fields/businesses are on the downswing. In other words when men don’t want those jobs anymore, or they are not as lucrative as they once were. And the reverse is true: for example, women were early computer coders, it was thought to be a lesser task. When it became clear how important those jobs were, women were pushed aside and men became coders.
I had a conversation with a producer friend while in LA and she is a historian of the film business. She said that early producers were often women, and as the success of film grew, women were squeezed out and many pushed to areas labeled “women’s work.” They were not able to climb the ladder and we are still suffering from the imbalance at the top.
She recommended the above book, which I look forward to reading.
"Erin Hill's book is an eye-opening look at 'women's work' in the entertainment industry. If you are asking why there aren't more women in the executive suite or the director's chair, the answer is here." (Diane English, writer, producer, director. Creds: Murphy Brown among others)
Here is another cartoon I drew several years ago, which was drawn more about the #MeToo movement, but it applies to trying to break in or rise to the top.
(Some of you may know, I am writing scripts and trying to “enter” Hollywood. It’s really tough — I know it’s tough for all genders. At some point I will write about what I’m writing about here on Seeing Things!)
I love both of these. Speaking of women coders, there's a wonderful, absorbing book called "The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies. It's by Jason Fagone. The woman was Elizabeth Friedman, and she did hugely important work during WW2. Any surprise that her codebreaker husband tended to get the credit for what she did?