Edwina Dumm

Who was Edwina Dumm?

Frances Edwina Dumm was a writer-artist who drew the comic strip Cap Stubbs and Tippie for six decades and is also notable as the nation’s first full-time female editorial cartoonist, She used her middle name for the signature on her comic strip, signed simply Edwina.

One of the earliest female syndicated cartoonists, Dumm was born in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, where her father, Frank Edwin Dumm, was an actor-playwright turned newspaperman. In 1911, she graduated from Central High School in Columbus, Ohio and then took the Cleveland-based Landon School of Illustration and Cartooning correspondence course. Her name was later featured in Landon's advertisements.

She drew editorial cartoons for the Columbus Daily Monitor from its first edition until the paper folded. In the Monitor, her Spot-Light Sketches was a full-page feature of editorial cartoons, and some of these promoted women's issues. Elisabeth Israels Perry, in the introduction to Alice Sheppard's Cartooning for Suffrage, wrote that artists such as Blanche Ames Ames, Lou Rogers and Edwina Dumm produced:

...a visual rhetoric that helped create a climate more favorable to change in America's gender relations... By the close of the suffrage campaign, women's art reflected the new values of feminism, broadened its targets, and attempted to restate the significance of the movement.