Nineteenth-century women illustrators and cartoonists provides an in-depth analysis of fifteen women illustrators of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Jemima Blackburn, Eleanor Vere Boyle, Marianne North, Amelia Francis Howard-Gibbon, Mary Ellen Edwards, Edith Hume, Alice Barber Stephens, Florence and Adelaide Claxton, Marie Duval, Amy Sawyer, Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, Pamela Colman Smith and Olive Allen Biller. The chapters consider these women’s illustrations in the areas of natural history, periodicals and books, as well as their cartoons and caricatures. Using diverse critical approaches, the volume brings to light the works and lives of these important women illustrators and challenges the hegemony of male illustrators and cartoonists in nineteenth-century visual and print culture.

This is the first book to focus on women illustrators in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It features critical essays by an international group of scholars on fourteen women illustrators from Britain, Canada and the United States.

Published in partnership with the Library of Congress, Drawn to Purpose: American Women Illustrators and Cartoonists presents an overarching survey of women in American illustration, from the late nineteenth into the twenty-first century. Martha H. Kennedy brings special attention to forms that have heretofore received scant notice--cover designs, editorial illustrations, and political cartoons--and reveals the contributions of acclaimed cartoonists and illustrators, along with many whose work has been overlooked. Featuring over 250 color illustrations, including eye-catching original art from the collections of the Library of Congress, Drawn to Purpose provides insight into the personal and professional experiences of eighty women who created these works. Included are artists Roz Chast, Lynda Barry, Lynn Johnston, and Jillian Tamaki. The artists' stories, shaped by their access to artistic training, the impact of marriage and children on careers, and experiences of gender bias in the marketplace, serve as vivid reminders of social change during a period in which the roles and interests of women broadened from the private to the public sphere. The vast, often neglected, body of artistic achievement by women remains an important part of our visual culture. The lives and work of the women responsible for it merit much further attention than they have received thus far. For readers who care about cartooning and illustration, Drawn to Purpose provides valuable insight into this rich heritage.

"I was in high spirits all through my unwise teens, considerably puffed up, after my drawings began to sell, with that pride of independence which was a new thing to daughters of that period."—The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote Mary Hallock made what seems like an audacious move for a nineteenth-century young woman. She became an artist. She was not alone. Forced to become self-supporting by financial panics and civil war, thousands of young women moved to New York City between 1850 and 1880 to pursue careers as professional artists. Many of them trained with masters at the Cooper Union School of Design for Women, where they were imbued with the Unity of Art ideal, an aesthetic ideology that made no distinction between fine and applied arts or male and female abilities. These women became painters, designers, illustrators, engravers, colorists, and art teachers. They were encouraged by some of the era's best-known figures, among them Tribune editor Horace Greeley and mechanic/philanthropist Peter Cooper, who blamed the poverty and dependence of both women and workers on the separation of mental and manual labor in industrial society. The most acclaimed artists among them owed their success to New York's conspicuously egalitarian art institutions and the rise of the illustrated press. Yet within a generation their names, accomplishments, and the aesthetic ideal that guided them virtually disappeared from the history of American art. Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York recaptures the unfamiliar cultural landscape in which spirited young women, daring social reformers, and radical artisans succeeded in reuniting art and industry. In this interdisciplinary study, April F. Masten situates the aspirations and experience of these forgotten women artists, and the value of art work itself, at the heart of the capitalist transformation of American society.

For much of the nineteenth century, women artists laboured under the same restrictions and taboos they had endured for centuries, and it was assumed that marriage and child-bearing were their goals in life. However, by the 1870s female art students of every nation were flocking to Paris in search of instruction in the city's private art schools. With proper training, they now had the confidence to tackle a wider range of subjects and by the century's end they were at last able to study the nude figure. During these breakthrough years, women won the right to work and exhibit alongside men, both in Europe and America, and the advent of art galleries and art dealers opened up new ways of selling their work. This book is full of surprising adventures: young women, still not allowed to visit a museum unchaperoned, travelled thousands of miles in a quest for first-class tuition; several Americans, while still in their twenties, journeyed to Rome to study sculpture; numerous free and independent women joined the artists' colonies that sprang up all over Europe, where they made lasting friendships, painting from dawn to dusk en plein air and enjoying the bohemian life. These trailblazing women rose to the challenges of the century's dramatic development in art styles - from Realism to the Avant-Garde - and triumphantly succeeded in becoming successful professional artists.

Picture of the prospects and constraints faced by women sculptors in the United States from the late eighteenth century throught the 1930s and the emerging of a professional identity for women artists. Thanks to their success as neoclassicists, women sculptors were able to cross over into nationalistic and political subjects that were unavailable to women painters.

Extending the limits of the award-winning Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century Periodicals and Newspapers (2016) and its companion volume (and also award-winning) Researching the Nineteenth-Century Press: Case Studies (2017), Work and the Nineteenth-Century Press: Living Work for Living People advances our knowledge of how our identities have become inextricably defined by work. The collection’s innovative focus on the nineteenth-century British press’s relationship to work illuminates an area whose effects are still evident today but which has been almost totally neglected hitherto. Offering bold new interpretative frameworks and provocative methodologies in media history and literary studies developed by an exciting group of new and established talent, this volume seeks to set a new research agenda for nineteenth-century interdisciplinary studies.