In truth women are desperate for something we can relate to, especially if it makes us laugh as well. It’s always been the issue that makes you unattractive as a woman and will probably affect your ability to bear children. If you think its bad now look up what the press had to say about suffragettes. When you got started did you have problems finding/establishing an audience, or proving there is a market for feminist humour to publishers?įeminism always gets a bad press, and always has done.

The most frequent question then was: “What do men think about these?” Amazing how little women have to do to cause a stir, and how much men can get away with before anyone takes any notice at all.Ĭonsidering that feminism has such a bad rap in the media, your postcards in particular seem to be really widely available. It may seem hard to believe but when the drawings first appeared they were perceived as being quite extreme. What reactions have you got to your cartoons over the years? I still meet people I taught there, and we all miss it. I felt like a collaborator and left, and the project eventually collapsed. I went freelance in 1991, mainly because the changes we were forced to make by Thatcher’s new regime made the art project unworkable.

I put them in envelopes and sent them to publishers, and drew the first two books while I was working full-time. They vanished pretty quickly, which I really wasn’t expecting. Years later when I was teaching on a project for unemployed school-leavers (silk-screen, leather, glass, mosaic,video, sound recording – it was fab) we did a market stall of things they’d made, and I photocopied the self-defence image onto card and put them out too. I wrote one of my essays as drawings, and the tutor (Griselda Pollock) suggested I took it to Spare Rib. The first cartoon to appear in print was during my last year at university, in ’78. The idea that women should learn survival strategies instead of making men accountable for their violence is ludicrous. What really happened was that when I finally got to work, pretty shaken, the men I worked with said “Well, what d’you expect wearing those earings?” The police weren’t very interested either, so I drew a revenge fantasy in the absence of any better response.

I drew it in response to an encounter with one of those psychotic men who seem to frequent the London Underground. The first one which became a postcard was ‘Self-defence’. How did you get started drawing feminist cartoons?

The Trouble With Women by Jacky Fleming