The Little Ladies Revolt

Abstract This essay follows an arc of feminist consciousness-raising, beginning with a newsletter put out by the “wives and girlfriends” of the underground comix artists of the early 1970s. Next it examines the feminist newspaper It Ain’t Me Babe (1970–71), especially a comic strip about consciousness-raising by Trina Robbins, Belinda Berkeley. That strip follows the life of a woman who earns a BA but works as a secretary to support her deadbeat boyfriend, and who over the course of the year that the comic ran has her consciousness raised via meetings with feminists. Robbins repurposed the title It Ain’t Me Babe for a comic book by and for women (1970), the subtitle of which was “Women’s Liberation.” Both the newspaper and comic book paralleled events in Trina Robbins’s life, and together they underline the importance of alternative newspapers and comics in creating a graphic version of an ongoing struggle for liberation. The essay ends with the anthology Wimmen’s Comix, which is well known in the history of alternative comics, and emphasizes the importance of these antecedents, the first tentative gestures of resistance and liberation, which are largely missing from that history and should be included.