Born in 1939, Nicole Hollander grew up on Chicago╒s west side, in one of the few Jewish families in a predominantly Italian neighborhood. Her mother was a hospital employee whose strong network of female friendships taught her daughter the value of the company of women; like all the women in Hollander╒s family, her mother worked full time out of necessity throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Hollander╒s father was a union carpenter who was passionate about the labor movement and progressive politics. He often got angry at his employers and walked off the job, several times attempting to start his own businesses, including two unsuccessful delicatessens.
Out of this environment came the down-to-earth toughness, the feminist consciousness, and the quirky, ironic sense of humor that informed Hollander╒s work as one of less than a handful of female syndicated cartoonists. With an MFA in painting, in 1976 Hollander published her first comic strip, ╥The Feminist Funnies,╙ in The Spokeswoman, a national feminist newsletter she designed and illustrated.
Three years later, I╒m in Training to be Tall and Blonde, her first book of cartoons, was published by St. Martin╒s Press. The book introduced Sylvia, the middle-aged, working class, outspoken heroine whom Hollander said was inspired by the way her mother and her friends dressed and talked when she was growing up. In 1981, Sylvia became a nationally syndicated comic strip, and Hollander began a series of battles with syndicates and newspaper editors over the feminist content of her work.
In 1982, she took control and began syndicating her own work, which meant not only creating the strip but reproducing it, sending it to outlets, and billing customers. Sylvia, her menagerie of irreverent cats, and a cast of characters including bartenders, waitresses, and an alien lover appeared in more than fifty newspapers. The strip╒s popularity spawned a line of greeting cards and calendars, a musical revue, and thirteen books, among them Everything Here is Mine: Sylvia╒s Unhelpful Guide to Cat Behavior, 1992, published by Avon.
In 1983 Hollander received the Wonder Woman Foundation Award for Women of Achievement over 40, and in 1985 she joined the likes of Alexander Haig, Moshe Dayan, and Robert Redford as a recipient of Yale╒s Chubb Fellowship for Public Service.
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