Alex Heberling

I’ve discovered Americans were giving women hammers with which to lay the smackdown long before any women in anime did so.  Let me share something I scanned this week at the library:

This is from Judge magazine, dated December 17th, 1901.  I found this picture delightful, simply for the fact that Public Opinion is anthropomorphized as a woman in a Greco-Roman dress with a large hammer/gavel by her side.  And she’s taking absolutely no crap from Uncle Sam here.  The McKinley memorial will be in Canton, Ohio, and that’s the end of it.

On a related note, I’ve been scanning images from Judge from this general time period, so I scanned things that were published both before and after McKinley’s assassination.  It’s interesting seeing history as it happened through the lense of the period’s media.  Unfortunately, the library doesn’t pay me to sit around and read old stuff, so I haven’t been able to actually peruse the magazines in any depth other than the pages I’ve been assigned to scan.

I was most intrigued by this image because I’m an anime fan and have been exposed to women and hammers for many years.  Even my instant messaging screenname is Black Mini-Mallet, a reference to a large black prop hammer I actually own.  Seeing an instance of this trope from so far in the past from a completely different country of origin is pretty awesome.

Treasury of Fine Art, where this and many other images I’ve scanned can be viewed online.