Working Cartoons: Ted Key’s Hazel and Domestic Labor Across Media

ABSTRACT Ted Key’s cartoon Hazel ran in the Saturday Evening Post magazine from 1943 until its final issue in 1969. This article analyzes how Key’s Hazel represents gender and labor, and especially the shifting labor conditions during and after World War II for domestic workers. Hazel was a captioned, single-image cartoon featuring a white domestic worker (named Hazel) in a middle-class suburban home, a premise that was also central to cartoonist Jackie Ormes’s Candy. In the Post, Hazel contains and allegorizes twentieth-century American social tensions within the domestic space of the white middle-class home.