An early example from pioneering Female Cartoonist/ Illustrator
Edwina Dumm, who draws a comic strip from her long-running cartoon
series Tippie which lasted for almost five decades. Signed and dated
Edwina, 9-25, matted but unframed.

Frances Edwina Dumm (1893 – April 28, 1990) was a writer-artist who
drew the comic strip Cap Stubbs and Tippie for nearly five decades; she
is also notable as America's first full-time female editorial
cartoonist. She used her middle name for the signature on her comic
strip, signed simply Edwina.
Biography

One of the earliest female syndicated cartoonists, Dumm was born in
Upper Sandusky, Ohio, and lived in Marion and Washington Courthouse,
Ohio throughout her youth before the family settled down in Columbus.[1]
Her mother was Anna Gilmore Dennis, and her father, Frank Edwin Dumm,
was an actor-playwright turned newspaperman. Dumm's paternal
grandfather, Robert D. Dumm, owned a newspaper in Upper Sandusky which
Frank Dumm later inherited. Her brother, Robert Dennis Dumm, was a
reporter for the Columbus Dispatch, and art editor for Cole Publishing
Company's Farm & Fireside magazine.

In 1911, she graduated from Central High School in Columbus, Ohio,
and then took the Cleveland-based Landon School of Illustration and
Cartooning correspondence course. Her name was later featured in
Landon's advertisements. While enrolled in the correspondence course,
she also took a business course and worked as a stenographer at the
Columbus Board of Education.

In 1915, Dumm was hired by the short-lived Republican newspaper, the
Columbus Monitor, to be a full-time cartoonist.[2] Her first cartoon was
published on August 7, 1915, in the debut issue of the paper. During
her years at the Monitor she provided a variety of features including a
comic strip called The Meanderings of Minnie about a young tomboy girl
and her dog, Lillie Jane, and a full-page editorial cartoon feature,
Spot-Light Sketches[3]. She drew editorial cartoons for the Monitor from
its first edition (August 7, 1915) until the paper folded (July 1917).
In the Monitor, her Spot-Light Sketches was a full-page feature of
editorial cartoons, and some of these promoted women's issues. Elisabeth
Israels Perry, in the introduction to Alice Sheppard's Cartooning for
Suffrage (1994), wrote that artists such as Blanche Ames Ames, Lou
Rogers and Edwina Dumm produced:

...a visual rhetoric that helped create a climate more favorable to
change in America's gender relations... By the close of the suffrage
campaign, women's art reflected the new values of feminism, broadened
its targets, and attempted to restate the significance of the
movement.[4]

After the Monitor folded, Dumm moved to New York City, where she
continued her art studies at the Art Students League. She was hired by
the George Matthew Adams Service[5] to create Cap Stubbs and Tippie, a
family strip following the lives of a boy Cap, his dog Tippie, their
family, and neighbors. Cap's grandmother, Sara Bailey, is prominently
featured, and may have been based on Dumm's own grandmother, Sarah Jane
Henderson, who lived with their family. The strip was strongly
influenced by Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as well as
Dumm’s favorite comic, Buster Brown by Richard F. Outcault. Dumm worked
very fast; according to comics historian Martin Sheridan, she could
pencil a daily strip in an hour.

Her love of dogs is evident in her strips as well as her
illustrations for books and magazines, such as Sinbad, her weekly dog
page which ran in both Life and the London Tatler. She illustrated
Alexander Woollcott's Two Gentlemen and a Lady. For Sonnets from the
Pekinese and Other Doggerel (Macmillan, 1936) by Burges Johnson
(1877–1963), she illustrated "Losted" and other poems.

From the 1931 through the 1960s, she drew another dog for the
newspaper feature Alec the Great, in which she illustrated verses
written by her brother, Robert Dennis Dumm. Their collaboration was
published as a book in 1946. In the late 1940s, she drew the covers for
sheet music by her friend and neighbor, Helen Thomas, who did both music
and lyrics. During the 1940s, she also contributed Tippie features to
various comic books including All-American Comics and Dell Comics.

In 1950, Dumm, Hilda Terry, and Barbara Shermund became the first women to be inducted into the National Cartoonists Society