“The Only Woman Caricaturist”

I’d never heard of Kate Carew until The Comics Journal wrote about her:

A woman. Traveled across country (alone?) to the biggest, most vital city in the world at the time. Got a job on a paper run and staffed by men. Cartooned. She did all this in the 1880s through the early teens. American women got the right to vote in 1920. Got it? Okay, let’s go on.

Mary Williams adopted the name “Kate Carew” and wrote candid, witty interviews with luminaries of the day, including Mark Twain, Pablo Picasso, and the Wright Brothers. She adorned her interviews with her unique “Carewatures,” and often drew herself into the scene. Imagine Oprah Winfrey as a liberated woman caricaturist-interviewer in 1900 and you have an idea of who Kate Carew was.

But she turns out to have been amazing, a cartoonist who in the 1900s and 1910s interviewed all the celebrities of her day. The Wright Brothers! Jack Johnson! (Q: was he “anxious to undermine the supremacy of the Caucasian race” with his boxing? A: No) Picasso! She even tricked Mark Twain into an interview.

In a 1904 Person’s Magazine feature, she talked about how she got her start:

I was a comparatively harmless painter person who had set up a studio in New York with a single eye to serious work-art with a capital “A,” you know–and in a mischievous moment I inked over some grotesque sketches of an actor which I had made on the margin of a theatre programme, and sent them to a newspaper, hardly expecting ever to hear of them again.

But lo! I did, and the sequel throws a light on the hunger for novelty which is the ruling passion of the bright young editors trained up by Mr. Joseph Pulitzer, proprietor of the New York World. It was to the World that I had sent my sketches. They fell into the hands of an editor whose hunger for novelty was especially poignant, and within two days I was engaged at what to a lowly painter of portraits seemed a ridiculously handsome figure, to supply the paper twice a week with two columns of theatrical caricature seasoned with frivolous comment. I awoke to find myself pseudonymously famous. The alias with which I had signed the sketches–I had selected it a random–shouted at me from advertisements and posters, and “The Only Woman Caricaturist” was flaunted before the public with a persistence which made me thank my stars I had not signed my real name.

Kate Carew also worked in comics, which was why she was mentioned in that TCJ review in the first place, with her best known comic being Angel Child:

All of which is enough for an independent movie company to make a documentary about her: