It’s A Girl’s Life, Hilda Terry
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The New York Times is celebrating its 175th anniversary, part of that observance is a series they are calling Overlooked where they write obituaries “about remarkable people whose deaths…went unreported in The Times.” Yesterday the remarkable person was cartoonist Hilda Terry (or here).
The obituary comes 20 years after Terry’s death and author Joanne Kaufman does a wonderful job profiling the famous cartoonist who forced the National Cartoonists Society (NCS) to begin accepting women as members.
Terry’s career was built and survived by drawing on the humorous life of young women and teenage girls:
Starting in the 1930s, she drew them not as the sweet little sisters, dutiful daughters or romantic supporting players that filled so many newspaper strips at the time, but as schemers, romantics, snobs, lovesick dreamers and social climbers. They obsessed about boys and clothes and parties, because, really, what else mattered?
Those magazine cartoons came to the attention of William Randolph Hearst who hired Terry to do a Sunday page of like material for his King Features Syndicate (KFS). It’s A Girl’s Life debuted on Dec. 7, 1941.
Henny and Penny starred in “a series of stand-alone, often interrelated gags” until June 25, 1944.
The following Sunday saw Terry replace the page of panels with sequential comic strip starring Teena.
Don Markstein tells us “‘Tina’ was a good candidate for the new one’s name, but the word “teenager” was just coming into vogue, so [“Teena”] was the spelling used.”
In 1949 Terry forced the issue of female membership in the (then) all-male National Cartoonists Society club, writing a tersely worded letter to the NCS. The letter ended with:
“We most humbly request that you either alter your title to the
National Men Cartoonists Society, or confine your activities to
social and private functions, or discontinue, in effect, whatever
rule or practice you have which bars otherwise qualified women
cartoonists to membership for purely sexual reasons.“
“Sincerely,
The Committee for Women Cartoonists
Hilda Terry, Temporary Chairwoman”
The entire letter and all the details of women gaining membership was covered by R. C. Harvey.
And so, in 1950, Hilda Terry, joined by Barbara Shermund and Edwina Dumm, became a member of the NCS.
Terry continued her Sunday-only comic strip until May 3, 1964 whereupon any papers that ran Teena but not Harry Haenigsen’s Penny more often than not picked up the Haenigsen strip.
Post Script.
From November 30, 1942 to July 1, 1944 the six panels that made up It’s A Girl’s Life Sunday page were distributed as the Monday through Saturday panel Junior Mischief.
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