Tillie the Toiler

Russ Westover's Tillie the Toiler put a young working woman at the center of the funny pages at a moment when American offices, and American women's lives, were rapidly changing. Tillie Jones was a stenographer and part-time model, stylish and ambitious, juggling work, suitors, and the daily comedy of getting ahead in the modern city. The strip caught something real about the 1920s: the arrival of the independent "working girl" as a cultural figure, and Westover threaded fashion, romance, and light workplace satire through her adventures with an easy popularity that lasted for decades. Its significance is twofold. First, it helped establish the working-woman strip as a genre, proving that a female lead navigating career and courtship could anchor a mass-audience feature. Second, its attention to clothes and style, sometimes even inviting readers to submit dress designs, showed how closely comics were woven into everyday fashion and aspiration. Tillie belongs to a small, important group of early strips that took women's modern lives seriously as subject matter, and in doing so widened the medium's sense of whose stories the funny pages could tell.