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“ Women were dumb about money, dumb about driving, dumb about anything that happened in the real world,” Swords said. “And that began my trip into feminism. I began to see how humor treated women. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Humor did it to blacks, too; they were dumb. Did it to Jews—not dumb, but sly; not to be trusted. The Irish at one time were the victims of humor. The Polish. The power of the stereotype. When you made them the object of humor, you could make them lose their humanity and become objects of ridicule, and you could even kill them with impunity.”

Suddenly, Swords said, she realized why there were so few women cartoonists…

Women cartoonists are discriminated against because of their ideas. “Women don’t make jokes,” she said, “because they are the joke.” What’s funny to a woman doesn’t appeal to male editors, who tend to want women in the jokes to be the butt of the humor; and women are likely to be uncomfortable to be always in that roll.

All at once, her “rather Pollyana view of humor as a kindly contemplation of life’s incongruities” (quoting Stephen Leacock) changed: she saw humor’s tremendous power “to kill as well as to amuse. Humor commits countless little murders of its victims’ self esteem. I saw that too often men used humor as a weapon against the Others of society, and it was women who marched at the head of this Hit Parade. And since each of us marches to a different drummer, we all join the humor hit parade at some time.”