Liza Donnelly has been a cartoonist and writer for The New Yorker magazine for forty-two years. She is also a contributor to the New York Times, Washington Post, Ms. magazine, Politico, CBS News, and CNN. She is the innovator of digital visual journalism, covering news and cultural events in realtime drawings, speaks around the world, and was a cultural envoy for the U.S. State Department. Donnelly’s very popular TED talk, “Drawing on Humor for Change,” has been translated into forty languages. She is the author of eighteen books; her Women on Men was a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor.

VERY FUNNY LADIES – The New Yorker’s Women Cartoonists
It’s no secret that most New Yorker readers flip through the magazine to look at the cartoons before they ever lay eyes on a word of the text. But what isn’t generally known is that over the decades a growing core group of artists who are women has contributed to the witty, memorable cartoons that readers look forward to each week. Now Liza Donnelly, herself a renowned cartoonist with The New Yorker for more than forty years, has written this engaging, in-depth celebration of the rich history of humor by women and the women cartoonists who have graced the pages of the famous magazine, from the Roaring Twenties to the present day.

In addition to being an anthology of funny, poignant, and entertaining cartoons, “Very Funny Ladies” is a unique examination of American history as it relates to women. Donnelly explores how, using cartoons as a mirror of society, it is easy to trace women’s roles by seeing how women have voiced their opinions and expressed their concerns on key social issues of the time. Early innovators in the twenties and thirties, like Helen Hokinson and Barbara Shermund, depicted women as working and independent, yet by the fifties they and other cartoonists returned to perpetuating existent stereotypes. Beginning with the second wave of feminism in the 1970s and continuing to the present, however, female cartoonists like Roz Chast and Liza Donnelly are no longer confined to “female” subject matter but instead comment on the world around them in their own human voices.

Donnelly also analyzes the evolution of The New Yorker and its cartoons—from early “he said, she said” drawings to “slice of life” and political cartoons. She discusses cartooning as a creative process and part of the artists’ work and lives, as well as the working relationships between cartoonists and editors. This new edition contains brand new chapters and a foreword by New Yorker editor David Remnick and cartoon editor Emma Allen. With fresh interviews for this updated edition, Donnelly examines the newest women cartoonists and their modern feminist expression, gender, and nonbina- ry experiences. Donnelly examines and celebrates the marked rise in the last ten years of women con- tributors as well as the increase of women of color drawing cartoons for The New Yorker.