EP H EM ERA
Women’s Liberation First comic book
It Ain’t Me Babe, 1970, 36 pp, Last Gasp Eco-Funnies
I N T H E SPR I NG of 2014 Mount Holyoke
MHC Archives and Special Collections (3)
A flyer by the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association distributed on campus during Suffrage Day on April 24, 1915, lists twelve reasons why women should be given the right to vote.
student body. That same year, the student organization held “Suffrage Day,” during which students protested, held debates, and distributed pro-suffrage literature. Yet, it would be five more years before the first women would cast their votes in a presidential campaign after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920. — B Y T AY L O R S C O T T
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on display
intellectual debates, and excel in academics every bit as rigorous as those at men’s colleges, the right to vote became more and more important. In the early 1900s, as the suffrage movement gained momentum, the Faculty Committee passed the constitution of the Mount Holyoke branch of the National College Equal Suffrage League on May 4, 1912. The chapter quickly sent a delegate to the annual council meeting and began to hold lectures on campus. One notable lecture, held in May 1914, featured Caroline Galt, associate professor of archaeology, who stated, “After all ‘arguments’—socalled—against equal suffrage have been met, the old objection is raised, ‘But the majority of women don’t want to vote.’ Looking back in our evolution when education was the passionate goal of women, did Mary Lyon wait to found her seminary till all women wanted to go to college?” By 1915, the membership of the Suffrage League numbered 350 students, nearly 45 percent of the
College acquired a first edition of It Ain’t Me Babe, the first American comic book to be created entirely by women, published in 1970. “When we looked at our collection in terms of curricular usage, we realized that there was a shortage of material from the modern women’s movement,” says Leslie Fields, head of Archives and Special Collections. “This was our first purchase toward rectifying that discrepancy.”
Acquisition of the volume coincided with the 2014 publication of The Secret History of Wonder Woman by historian and Harvard history professor Jill Lepore, who spent a lot of time on campus researching Sadie Holloway, class of 1915, said to be the inspiration for the character of Wonder Woman. “It seemed like a serendipitous acquisition,” says Fields, especially considering Wonder Woman is depicted on the comic book’s cover.
It Ain’t Me Babe includes comics from early comic artists and writers Trina Robbins, Lisa Lyons, and Michele Brand, members of the Berkeley-based Women’s Liberation Basement Press. Initially these women came together to create an alternative comic in a male-dominated industry. In just a few years, however, the collaboration led to the creation of Wimmen’s Comix, an influential all-female underground comics anthology published from 1972 to 1992 that dealt directly with feminist concerns, homosexuality, and politics. The comic book contains stories including “Queen of the Jungle,” which follows a wildspirited woman who fights injustice and is bookended by sketches of secretaries drudging through their work. Perhaps most intriguing to Mount Holyoke scholars, who can view the book in the College’s archives, the comic includes an account of the feminist awakenings of the marginalized heroines of mainstream comics. — B Y T AY L O R S C O T T
W E B E XC L U S I V E
Take a closer look at It Ain’t Me Babe at alumnae.mtholyoke. edu/comics.
Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly
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