Bad Girls and Barbara Shermund

Biographical details about Barbara Shermund’s life are sparse, but Caitlin McGurk makes the most of what little is known. Her book Tell me A story Where the Bad Girl Wins: the Life and Art of Barbara Shermund includes a lavish selection of Shermund’s cartoons and artwork, reproduced in generous, glorious abundance.

Shermund drew some cracking cartoons, many of the best of which appeared in The New Yorker in the years between the wars. She specialized in fashionable, razor-tongued, independent women – cartoons that feel like eavesdropping on private conversations between cynical observers of the world, women with a sharp eye for the absurdities of social relations and expectations.

Here’s a few of my favorites from those years. I’m not as impressed by the cartoons she created for Esquire or in the later decades. Times changed, and witty independent women had become sexy support systems for male fantasy. I’m glad she was able to keep working, but I don’t really like some of the later cartoons.

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“Remember Mother – I’m only a child -“

Yeah, I s’pose the best thing is to just get married and forget about love

“You’re better off in New York – Paris is full of Americans”

“It’s joyfully, resoundingly queer,” says Emily Flake in the foreword. Really?

These cartoons, writes Caitlin McGurk, are “bitingly sarcastic and loose, frequently making fun of men” and “covertly queer.” She adds that Shermund “was deeply private and led an unconventional life for a woman.”

“We can’t claim that Barbara Shermund was the first to do anything, the last to do anything, or the best to do anything. We can’t claim with certainty that she was straight or queer –  or that she was a happy person or a tortured one. But her work was good, and it was good, and there was a time when it was everywhere.” – McGurk

In writing about the early years of The New Yorker and the influence of Harold Ross, McGurk comments that he was “thinking about a cosmopolitan readership, and wanted the ideas solicited by gag-men as well as cartoonists to appeal to a diversity of metropolitan types, including queer readers.”

She quotes him as saying, “We are especially anxious to please the fairy trade.”

That McGurk renders all this – and some of Shermund’s cartoons – through a gender-theory lens is disconcerting, distorting, and ahistorical. The fact that the magazine, and Shermund herself, recognized that not everyone was heterosexual, and that some of their target audience was homosexual, is transformed through the lens of postmodern theory into something it simply was not.

Classic Camp

For McGurk, these “queer” cartoons supposedly invite the reader to glean unspoken meanings from the juxtaposition of types. I read them as knowing, insider, campy jokes. Shermund’s cartoons often do contain covert double meanings as they take digs at prevailing norms and conformity. That does not make them “queer”.

Then there’s this clunky line in a section describing Shermund’s fertile imagination and the difficulty of pairing her with compatible gag-writers:

“She was bursting with her own ideas in those early days, and it’s possible the ‘realness’ of Shermund’s work may also be what made her difficult to pair with a compatible writer at first. In the magazine cartooning business, the use of ‘gag-men’ – or caption writers – had long been standard practice. Although people of all genders sent in ideas, the term ‘gag-men’ was standard for the time…”

The sexism of “gag-men,” as opposed to “gag-writers,” is understood. But what to make of her phrase “all genders”? How many “genders” are there? Clearly McGurk is not using gender as a synonym for sex; since there are only two sexes, she would have used the word “both” rather than “all.”

Trigger Warnings

It’s stuff like this that makes me feel that we need more trigger warnings.

If university students need trigger warnings for Hamlet, then how about reader discretion advisories for the reality-based who find both fiction and non-fiction increasingly infused with confusing and infuriating gender woo?

The difficulty with McGurk’s framing is that it applies postmodern “queer” and queer theory to a world in which they simply did not exist. Shermund lived in a world – and drew for a readership – that included heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual men and women. Ross knew that too, as his casual reference to the “fairy trade” makes clear; but there were no “queer readers.”

In the 1920s, queer was a slur, not an identity, a community, or an umbrella term for those who want to be special. 

Retro-fitting contemporary queer theory onto Shermund’s work is anachronistic. Her cartoons work precisely because they arise from the specific social landscape of late Jazz Age New York: a cosmopolitan, sophisticated, often slyly knowing milieu in which witty, modern, independent women surveyed the rituals and absurdities of their world. Shermund should be enjoyed on her own terms, not read through the muzzy curtain of ours, where messy theoretical constructs compete with material reality.

But let’s have some more cartoons and think instead of the world of Shermund, Dorothy Parker, and Anita Loos’s Lorelei Lee. Lots to enjoy and celebrate in her subversive takes on the social whirl and world of another place and time.