Cathy Lee Guisewite (born September 5, 1950) is an American cartoonist who created the comic strip Cathy, 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."
Early life
Guisewite was born in Dayton, Ohio, and younger sister Mickey. Guisewite graduated from Midland High School in 1968.
She attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she was a member of the Delta Delta Delta sorority. In 1972, she earned a bachelor's degree in English.
Career
After college, Guisewite followed her father's vocation and began working in advertising at Campbell-Ewald, then Norman Prady, and settled at W.B. Doner & Co. near Detroit. She became a vice president of the firm in 1976.
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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.
Guisewite was flabbergasted when the company sent her a contract to produce a comic strip. Cathy was syndicated to 66 newspapers in 1976 by Universal Press Syndicate, now Universal Uclick, 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.”
At the peak of the strip's popularity in the mid-1990s, it appeared in almost 1,400 papers.
Awards
In 1987, she received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program for the TV special Cathy.
Guisewite is a member of the National Cartoonists Society and in 1993 received its highest honor, the Reuben 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.
Personal life
Guisewite adopted daughter Ivy in 1992, then married screenwriter Christopher Wilkinson in 1997. Wilkinson has a son, Cooper, but the couple had no children together. Guisewite and Wilkinson divorced in 2010.