Cathy Guisewite

Cathy Lee Guisewite, born September 5, 1950, is an American cartoonist best known for creating Cathy, a comic strip that ran for 34 years. The strip followed a career woman coping with eating, work, relationships, and having a mother, which the character once summed up as “the four basic guilt groups.” It began in the 1970s, a time Guisewite described as confusing for women caught between being “a liberated woman” and being “a traditionalist.” Her character lived in that tension, often with panic, appetite, self-doubt, and a sharp punch line.

Guisewite was born in Dayton, Ohio, to William L. and Anne Guisewite, and was raised in Midland, Michigan, with her older sister Mary Anne Nagy and younger sister Mickey. She graduated from Midland High School in 1968, then attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she belonged to Delta Delta Delta sorority. In 1972, she earned a bachelor’s degree in English. After college, she followed her father into advertising, working at Campbell-Ewald, then Norman Prady, and later at W.B. Doner & Co. near Detroit. By 1976, she had become a vice president of the firm.

The drawings that became Cathy began as a private habit. Guisewite made funny pictures as an “emotional coping mechanism” for events in her life and work, then sent them to her parents. Her mother kept urging her to send them to a publisher. Guisewite later said that her goal was not to create a comic strip, but “to get my mother off my back.” When Universal Press Syndicate sent her a contract, she was flabbergasted. In 1976, Cathy was syndicated to 66 newspapers, and for a time Guisewite worked in advertising by day and drew comics at night.

By 1980, Cathy appeared in 150 daily newspapers, and Guisewite was earning $50,000 a year from the strip. She left advertising, moved to Santa Barbara, California, and made the comic her full-time work. Its popularity kept growing. At its peak in the mid-1990s, the strip appeared in almost 1,400 papers. Guisewite also appeared several times on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. In 1987, she received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program for the TV special Cathy. In 1993, she received the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year for her work in 1992.

Her work also reached readers through many book collections, beginning with The Cathy Chronicles in 1978. Other titles included What Do You Mean, I Still Don’t Have Equal Rights??!!, I Think I’m Having a Relationship With a Blueberry Pie!, Reflections, A Fifteenth Anniversary Collection, Cathy Twentieth Anniversary Collection, and Cathy Collection: 25th Anniversary Book. In 2001, she published separate collections on food, love, mom, and work, each tied to one of the strip’s “four basic guilt groups.” Guisewite was also granted honorary degrees from Russell Sage College, Rhode Island College, and Eastern Michigan University.

Guisewite adopted her daughter Ivy in 1992. She married screenwriter Christopher Wilkinson in 1997; Wilkinson had a son, Cooper, and the couple had no children together. They divorced in 2010, the same year Guisewite announced the retirement of Cathy on August 11. The strip ended on October 3, 2010. Its humor still speaks plainly because it came from ordinary pressure: jobs, family, romance, body image, and the feeling of trying to be more than one kind of woman at once.