Cartooning for Suffrage

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Summary: Sheppard finds the mothers cartoonists never knew they had
Review: As American editorial cartooning becomes more and more irrelevant, Alice Sheppard's fine book shows what a powerful tool this once popular medium can be. For ten brief years starting around 1910, dozens of women came out of nowhere and began cartooning for the womens' right to vote. Two or three like Rose O'Neil were well known as illustrators but most of the others picked up their pens simply to fight for what they thought was justice. Imagine! They won no prizes. No reprints in Newsweek. No 401K plans through their newspapers' corporate pension plans. Their only prize was the 19th Amendment. Sheppard does a great job of exhuming the stories of these funny, talented, now mostly forgotten cartoonists. Signe Wilkinson