Cathy Lee Guisewite (born September 5, 1950) is an Americancartoonist who created thecomic stripCathy, which had a 34-year run. The strip focused on a career woman facing the issues and challenges of eating, work, relationships, and having a mother—or as the character put it in one strip, "the four basic guilt groups."
Guisewite was born inDayton, Ohio,[1] to William L. and Anne Guisewite. She was raised inMidland, Michigan, with older sister Mary Anne Nagy[2] and younger sister Mickey. Guisewite graduated fromMidland High School in 1968.
After college, Guisewite followed her father's vocation and began working in advertising[1] atCampbell-Ewald, then Norman Prady, and settled atW.B. Doner & Co. near Detroit. She became a vice president of the firm in 1976.[3]
She continued to draw funny pictures as an "emotional coping mechanism" to events in her life and work, and she would forward them to her parents.[1] Her mother kept urging her to send them to a publisher, so she did. "My entire goal with my submission package was to get my mother off my back. My goal was not to do a comic strip. It was to make Mom quit telling me I could do a comic strip."[4]
Guisewite was flabbergasted when the company sent her a contract to produce a comic strip.Cathy was syndicated to 66 newspapers in 1976[5] byUniversal Press Syndicate, nowUniversal Uclick,[6] and Guisewite did both—her advertising job during the day, and comics at night. By 1980, the strip was carried by 150 dailies, she was earning $50,000 per year forCathy,[5] she quit the advertising business to work onCathy full-time, and she moved to Santa Barbara, California.[1]
The comic strip was a "running social commentary"[7] for her confusion. Guisewite explained, "You were a liberated woman or you were a traditionalist. To even voice vulnerability if you were a feminist was wrong and to voice interest in liberation if you were a more traditional woman was wrong. So I believe the women I was speaking to in the early years of my strip were women like me, who were at that age in our 20s where we were kind of launched into adulthood with a foot in both worlds and no way to really express it.”[7]
At the peak of the strip's popularity in the mid-1990s, it appeared in almost 1,400 papers.[1] However, on August 11, 2010, Guisewite announced the strip's retirement after 34 years. Its run ended on October 3, 2010 (aSunday strip).[6][9]
In 1987, she received anEmmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program for the TV specialCathy.
Guisewite is a member of theNational Cartoonists Society and received in 1993 its highest honor, theReuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year, for her work in 1992.
Guisewite has been granted honorary degrees from Russell Sage College, Rhode Island College, and Eastern Michigan University.[10]
Guisewite adopted daughter Ivy in 1992, then married screenwriterChristopher Wilkinson in 1997. Wilkinson has a son, Cooper, but the couple had no children together.[11][12] Guisewite and Wilkinson divorced in 2010.[12]
