Winner, 2022 Charles Hatfield Award from the Comics Studies Society In the years following 1975, a group of female-created comic strips came to national attention in a traditionally male-dominated medium.  Typical Girls: The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips  uncovers the understudied and developing history of these strips, defining and exploring the ramifications of this expression of women’s roles at a time of great change in history and in comic art. This impressive, engaging, and timely study illustrates how these comics express the complexities of women’s experiences, especially as such experiences were shaped by shifting and often competing notions of womanhood and feminism. Including the comics of Lynn Johnston ( For Better or For Worse ), Cathy Guisewite ( Cathy ), Nicole Hollander ( Sylvia ), Lynda Barry ( Ernie Pook’s Comeek ), Barbara Brandon-Croft ( Where I’m Coming From ), Alison Bechdel ( Dykes to Watch Out For ), and Jan Eliot ( Stone Soup ),  Typical Girls  is an important history of the representation of womanhood and women’s rights in popular comic strips. “ Typical Girls  provides a delightful tour of seven female comic strip creators and their approaches to their art and their politics in their comic strips. … Kirtley carefully delineates the many feminisms and how the artists illustrate them throughout, maintaining a balance between the relationship of the artists and their protagonist/s to feminisms. … Summing up: Highly recommended.” —A. N. Valdivia,  CHOICE “An excellent overview of and rumination upon an aspect of comics that is often overlooked, and as Kirtley stresses is a baton that ought to be taken up by other scholars of both feminism and comics studies. The texts she chooses to examine are both important and telling: important because of the ways in which they reflect and speak back to the culture of the times in which they were produced and telling because they are so few and far-between.” —Houman Sadri,  MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture “ Typical Girls charts the way for comics studies to critically re-examine recent newspaper strips beyond the canon of accepted classics. … Kirtley’s ability to reveal the hidden depths of even the most apparently simple or naive strip is made possible by her careful ear for ambivalence, indecision and contradiction." —Fi Stewart-Taylor, Studies in Comics “Eisner-Award-winner Susan Kirtley returns with a must-read book on how female-created comic strips changed the perceptions of womanhood and women’s rights. As that fight continues, Kirtley’s book offers a reminder of where the struggle has been and where it needs to go from here.” —Philip Nel, author of  Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books “ Typical Girls  reads comic strips alongside contemporary discourses of womanhood, motherhood, and feminisms, resulting in vital interpretations that forcefully remind us of how political discourses were expressed in newspaper comics.” —Lara Saguisag, author of  Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics Susan Kirtley is Professor of English at Portland State University. Individually and collectively the scope of these strips has not yet been considered in academic writing, but comic strips are certainly, as scholar Tom Inge points out, “well loved” (xxi). However, these artists “should also be respected for what they have contributed to the visual and narrative arts of the world” (“Comics as Culture” 191). Though comic art has until recently been largely overlooked by scholars, when examined closely, the form demonstrates a highly sophisticated structure of its own, linking text and image in complex and intriguing ways, and building a story that could not be related by text or image alone. Joseph Witek argues that comic art demonstrates “a highly developed narrative grammar and vocabulary based on an inextricable combination of verbal and visual elements” (3). This study will explore how this intriguing pairing of words and pictures creates a rhetoric of womanhood specific to the form. Thus, this project, while acknowledging its limited focus on a small sampling of female comic strip creators’ work during a limited time period, seeks to offer a novel assessment of the historical moment during which the Women’s Rights movement became a national conversation (focusing on the 1970s and 1980s, in particular), demonstrating the ways in which the most prominent and widely read comic strips created by women of the time bolster stereotypes of gender and domesticity even as they challenged them, presenting complicated women struggling to reconceive of success and fulfillment amidst competing visions of female identity, femininity, and domesticity. The comic strips of Lynn Johnston, Cathy Guisewite, Nicole Hollander, Lynda Barry, Barbara Brandon-Croft, Alison Bechdel, and Jan Eliot offer a nuanced understanding of females coming