Gender Battles in Women’s Comics of the Second-Wave Feminist Era

Based on scholarship from across the disciplines, this article calls attention to examples of gender-themed comics from the era of second-wave feminism with the aim of bringing them into our thematic dossier’s wider discussion of “seeing” the history of women, gender, and sexuality through visual sources. I will suggest how a focus on women’s comics brings new perspectives to historians’ understanding of second-wave feminism, its origins, and its contestations. I will begin by looking at scholarship on some of the key moments in the production and reception of women’s comics in the U.S., putting this in comparative context by looking a few examples from France. I then discuss American feminists’ embrace of and objections to women’s comics, as well as rifts within the community of women comic artists and readers of comics. I will then briefly exemplify two themes that women comic artists explored – body image and motherhood – pointing to the complicated place of these themes in relationship to the broader feminist critique. I will end with a brief note on legacies of and pushbacks against second-wave feminism as they appear in the realm of comics.